Medicare Prescription Drug Legislation
MEDICARE PRESCRIPTION DRUG LEGISLATION -- (House of Representatives - February 10, 2004)
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 7, 2003, the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pallone) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
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Mr. SANDERS. I want to thank my friend from New Jersey for his consistent leadership on an issue that is so important to tens and tens of millions of Americans.
I think the first point to be made and that many American seniors are wondering about is, hey, what is in this benefit for me? Is it good? We hear from the President, we hear from some of our Republican friends that this bill is going to go a long way to solve the problems of seniors paying very, very high prices for their prescription drugs and a whole lot of money out of their own pockets. So let us get the facts straight. Let us put it right out there on the table.
If you spend $500 a year out of pocket, what are you going to pay out of the President's new plan? You are going to pay $733. What? For $500 worth of prescription drugs? Yes, that is the case. Because there is a premium of $35, a deductible of $250 and coinsurance, copayment of 25 percent from the first $251 to $2,250. If you spend $1,000 out of pocket, you are going to pay 85 percent out of your own pocket. If you spend $3,000 a year, you pay 64 percent. If you spend $4,000 a year, you pay 73 percent. Does that sound like a very good deal?
What is even worse, as the gentleman from New Jersey has indicated, because there is no cost containment in this bill, the Consumers Union of America has estimated that one year after the implementation of this legislation, seniors will be paying more out of their own pockets for prescription drugs than they pay today. Why? Because when there is no cost containment, prescription drug costs will go up 15 percent, 15 percent, 15 percent. Three years from now, prescription drug costs will be 40 or 50 percent higher, nullifying the minimum benefits in this bill.
This is a bad, bad bill providing minimal benefits to our seniors.
I was reminded in the process of how this bill became a law, and the gentleman from New Jersey will remember how when we were kids we went to school and they say this is how a bill becomes a law. I am afraid they are going to have to rewrite those textbooks because let me tell the listeners and my friends how a bill becomes a law in the United States Congress in 2004.
First of all, of course, you have to contribute a whole lot of money to get your voice heard. On June 19, 2002, 2 days
after Republicans unveiled their new Medicare bill, surprise, surprise, the pharmaceutical industry staged a fund-raiser for President Bush and the Republican Party in which it raised a record-breaking $30 million in one night. It goes on from there.
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Mr. SANDERS. It is important for the American people to see how a bill becomes a law.
Number one, if you have an interest and you want a bill to become a law, stage a massive fund-raising event and contribute to the President of the United States. That is step number one. I know it is not in the local textbooks, but that is really how it goes on.
Step number two, ignore the will of the Nation's elected representatives. What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is that on July 25, 2003, the House of Representatives, and frankly in a bipartisan way, had the courage to stand up to the pharmaceutical industry and the Republican leadership and they passed strong reimportation legislation which says that pharmacists, prescription drug distributors and Americans should be able to purchase safe, affordable, FDA-approved medicine in any one of 26 industrialized countries, thereby lowering the cost of prescription drugs in the United States by 25 to 50 percent.
But if you are serious about making a bill into a law, you have got to ignore that. You ignore what the House did, you ignore the votes that are in the Senate, and you say good-bye to that. But the gentleman from New Jersey just told us what you do. You suddenly put into the bill in conference committee language that says, amazingly, that the United States Government and Medicare cannot negotiate with the pharmaceutical industry to lower the cost of prescription drugs.
That is step number two in how a bill becomes a law in the year 2004 in the Republican Congress.
Step number three, and this is a beauty. I do not think the textbooks in high schools or elementary schools have this one. Ram your bill through even if you do not have the votes.
What does that mean? How do you do that?
On November 22, 2003, at 5:53 a.m., the House Republicans passed their Medicare bill. By all accounts, it was an historic night in the Capitol. Under House rules, as we all know, votes are supposed to last for 17 minutes; and then the Speaker gavels the rollcall to an end. Amazingly enough, that particular vote lasted a record-breaking 3 hours. Three hours. That is part of the process of how a bill becomes a law: Ignore the rules of the House.
Mr. PALLONE. The other thing, just to add to that, is that when the 17 minutes are up, because I was here, the votes were against the bill. In other words, there were 218 votes, which is a majority, against the bill. So the bill lost at that time. It is just amazing.
Mr. SANDERS. That is the third key point. Ignore the rules of the House of Representatives; and if you are losing, do not accept that. Just keep going and 3 hours later twist enough arms so that at 5:53 in the morning, I believe it was, you will get the votes to pass it.
Mr. BROWN of Ohio. If the gentleman will yield, I do not want to argue with the gentleman from Vermont, but he has got to be fair. The fact is that the Republicans worked all summer to learn how to do this. It was not that they just figured out how to ram a bill through in the middle of the night in November to do the drug bill. If the gentleman will recall, in the middle of the night on a Thursday night in April, they rammed through by one vote a cut in veterans' benefits.
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Then in the middle of the night on a Thursday night in May, they eviscerated Head Start by one vote. Then in the middle of the night on a Thursday night in June, they cut education by, I believe, three votes. Then in the middle of the night on a Thursday in June or July, they did it again. Then even in the middle of the night in September, they passed $87 billion for Iraq. So they are getting pretty good at this. They may not follow the civics textbooks quite as well as we are hoping they would, but they have learned how to do things in the middle of the night when the press is gone, when the public has gone to sleep, when nobody much is in the press gallery, and then it really does not get very much attention in the papers. I hesitate to interrupt the gentleman, but I will go back to my friend from Vermont.
Mr. SANDERS. Mr. Speaker, just a few more steps on how a bill becomes law. Step number four is to mislead members of one's own party, of one's own party who have reservations about this bill. There were many honest Republican conservatives who had from their own perspective doubts about the bill. They did not want to spend the kind of money that is going to have to be spent. So what the President says and what the Republican leadership says is this bill over a 10-year period is going to cost $395 billion; they can vote for it, $395 billion. Amazingly enough, 2 months later, 2 months after the President signed the bill into law, he submitted a budget to Congress that put the estimate of that legislation at $530 billion. Only $135 billion off over a 10-year period. It is likely many of us believe, in fact, that that bill will cost a lot more because it does not have any cost containment.
Step number five is to stick to one's story regardless of the facts. In the State of the Union address, the President stated that "for a monthly premium of about $35, most seniors can expect to see their drug bills cut roughly in half." Unfortunately, that claim is simply untrue. The reality is that most seniors will see their drug bills cut by only about one third and maybe even less.
Step number six is to turn one's work on the bill to one's own personal gain. And I think the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pallone) made this point. Here we have the chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce that wrote this legislation, took the lead in shaping this bill. According to The Washington Post, that gentleman, the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Tauzin), is expected to take a job from PhRMA, which is the lobby from the pharmaceutical industry, and leave the House of Representatives before his term expires. Another key player, Thomas Scully, the immediate former head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the White House point person on the Medicaid bill, recently left his post to work for a law firm that represents pharmaceutical and other health care interests; and we were told that this bill was really written for the senior citizens of the United States, not for the pharmaceutical industry.
The last and final point in terms of how a bill becomes a law is to use taxpayers' money to "educate" the citizens if they are not buying their story. Recently, President Bush has launched a $23 million advertising blitz all at taxpayer expense to tout the Medicare bill. A media firm working for his reelection campaign will get a cut of the pie for buying the air time for the government touting the new Medicare law.
The bottom line here is, I think it is time to rewrite the textbooks in this country about how a bill becomes a law. What we have seen in the last many months, a year, is a shameful process. It is a process of big money buying clout and buying legislation, and it is something that we have got to change immediately.
I yield back to my friend.
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