Republicans Accomplish Medicare Reform

REPUBLICANS ACCOMPLISH MEDICARE REFORM -- (House of Representatives - June 22, 2004)

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Bilirakis) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.

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Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman for yielding to me, and I thank him for hosting this special order. I worked with the chairman and other members of the Republican conference for years to try to bring this prescription drug benefit into law. And while I did, there were two images that I kept in my mind that drove me as many long hard nights as it took to get this legislation passed.

One of them was a letter I received from an 86-year-old woman that was handwritten several years ago. I do not know if she is still alive, but she described in detail how she has to take six medications. She had no prescription drug benefit whatsoever. She had to pay for those medications out of the little meager Social Security check that she received. And she said to me in this letter that she can barely afford, but she could manage to buy her heart medicine, because that she needed or she would not stay alive. She would die. She could scrape enough money to pay for the medicine that kept the diabetes she was suffering from from killing her.

She was able to get blood pressure medicine that she needed to stay alive, and even pay for the cholesterol-lowering drugs. But she had no money left for the medication that she needed to end her pain from arthritis, and she had no money left to end the emotional pain she suffered from her depression.

So there she was, in a dilemma: Able to pay for the drugs necessary to keep her alive, but not able to pay for important drugs that would make her life worth living.

The other image that I recall vividly is that in one of my offices in the district there is a watchman, a security guard. An elderly gentleman. A wonderful fellow. And every time I walk through the doors, I would go past his desk. And particularly years ago when my daughters were younger, he would always give me two lollipops for my daughters. And he would say, How are you guys in Washington doing on that prescription drug benefit? Because my wife is very ill and she needs so much medication, and we have no benefit. And the reason I have to work at my age is just to make enough money to try to pay for her drugs. And every day I would say, we are working on it, we are working on it, we are going to get it done. And I would almost be afraid to go in a week later and say we had not succeeded.

In fact, we passed a prescription drug benefit in this House in the year 2000. We did it again; it died in the Senate. We did it again in 2002; died in the Senate. Finally, in 2003, we got the bill passed in the House, as we all know by one vote. The Senate passed it with bipartisan support and the President signed it. And finally, finally, after all of these years, after seniors waiting for nearly 40 years for a prescription benefit, we have created it.

Now, what happens? We are subject to criticism night after night. As I am working in my office, I am looking on the monitor watching C-SPAN and I see some of the Democrats on the other side railing and railing against the prescription drug benefit, which, as the chairman just pointed out, amazingly, amazingly, the most liberal Members of the Democratic party had, not too long ago, introduced a bill that did precisely the same thing; used precisely the same mechanisms.

The problem is, they have a political problem. The political problem they have is that the Democratic party has always said, oh, we are the party that loves the senior citizens. We are the party that will deliver them the benefits under Medicare. But they failed. And they failed for all of the time in which they had control of the Congress. And it kills them that it was a Republican House and a Republican Senate and a Republican President that actually got it enacted in law. It is driving them crazy.

So what do they do? They have no choice but to come and trash the very bill that parallels the bill they introduced and try to scare senior citizens into not taking advantage of it. In my district, we hold meetings to explain the new Medicare drug card so seniors understand it. But in the districts of those who come to the floor and oppose it, there is no one there to even help them. Their Congressperson and staff does not help the seniors to understand and navigate the system.

Fortunately, the Medicare program over at CMS has a wonderfully helpful Web site that seniors can go to. They just go to the Web site, and if they do not have access to a computer, they can go to a library or a senior center and get help there. They put in the drugs they take, and they look at the variety of discount cards and pick the one that is best for them.

But it is when you do something, it is when you actually accomplish something and get it done that you are subject to criticism. It is hard to criticize someone in detail about something they never accomplished. We got the job done, so we suffer the criticism. That is fine. The bottom line is that the seniors and those who are physically disabled in America now have the benefit.

The full benefit could not come overnight. You cannot go from zero to 100 miles an hour overnight. You have to set up a system. So we have this interim period with the drug cards. If you are poor, $600 of free drugs and a discount.

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If you are not poor, you get the discount; and you get a discount tailored to your needs.

In January of 2006, the full benefit becomes available to every Medicare recipient, every elderly person, every disabled person in the country, a historic occasion, a historic occasion for this country. Finally, everyone in America in those categories will have access to a first-rate pharmaceutical program.

I am proud to say that in Pennsylvania my constituents in my State will have the best program in the country, because what we did in Pennsylvania is we made sure that the Pennsylvania Pace Program, which is now spending $400 million a year, dollars derived from our lottery, that $400 million a year is no longer going to be needed to pay for drugs for the poor people in Pennsylvania, because our Medicare program will do that.

So now with that extra money, we are going in Pennsylvania to be able to fill in some of the shortages in coverage, the so-called doughnut hole, and be able to pay some of the shared cost for our recipients. The people in Pennsylvania will have an exquisitely generous program, and people across the country will have a very good program beginning in January 2006.

I am proud to have worked so hard to gain the success. I am proud of the chairman, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Bilirakis), for his work; proud of the President for supporting this bill and signing it; and I think it is high time that instead of fear-mongering for political purposes, every Member of Congress ought to get on with the business of encouraging their seniors back home to take advantage of this program. It is in their interest to do so and explain to them how it is to their benefit to do so. That is public service. Public service is helping the elderly and the disabled in their district get access to a very helpful program. It is not public service to simply malign the program for political purposes.

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Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Florida (Chairman BILIRAKIS) for yielding.

Let me say to the chairman, he has had a long and distinguished career in the United States Congress, and I am sure that at the end of that career, the gentleman will look back with pride and say, if he is proud of anything he was able to accomplish in all of the countless 2 o'clock in the morning, 3 o'clock in the morning, 6 o'clock in the morning sessions we have spent here, I would think it would be that you were at the helm when this Congress passed prescription drug benefit for seniors. It is an historic accomplishment, and the gentleman should be proud of it. I know he is.

The other people who are proud of it, interestingly enough, are, as the chairman just said, the AARP, the American Association for Retired Persons, and all of the groups that care and are devoted to the care of patients. So if you are an organization like the AARP, there is no organization more respected by seniors than they, if you are one of the thousands of organizations that are devoted to making sure that people with illnesses get medicine, you are for the bill.
So, how could we imagine that, after 35 years of struggling, nearly 40 years of struggling without success to get a prescription drug benefit, finally the Members of this Congress, the House and the Senate in a bipartisan fashion, with the President of the United States signing the bill, we get it done, we devote half a trillion dollars to these prescription drug benefits, and who in the world would imagine that the reaction would be, from some quarters, let us criticize it. Let us attack it. Let us destroy it.

Let me let you in on a little secret: A Democratic pollster provided some strategic information to the Democratic Party about how to respond to the fact that we had accomplished this great thing as Republicans and they needed a political strategy.

What the pollster said, this is Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, Inc., in a Lake, Snell, Perry & Associates memo to the Democratic Party, they said, "A message of fixing the bill reinforces the AARP message that we have made a good start and might continue to improve it. But that would give the message that the law is not all bad," so what she suggested was that we have to "shift the debate in our favor as the straight negative portrayal of the law."

So any sort of sensible approach that says, hey, after all these years, we made a great start, let us keep making it better, let us enrich the benefit over time, you do not win the political debate if you do that. So you have to say the whole darn thing is no good, it was done for the worst of reasons, and let us condemn those who tried to make it happen.

It is pretty astonishing hard to believe, hard to imagine that you would come along and spend half a trillion dollars to take care of the prescription drug benefits and needs of the seniors and the disabled, and the response is so negative.
One of the chief critics of the program is the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown), the ranking member on the committee of the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Bilirakis). The gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) is a friend of mine and a colleague, but he has a penchant for never being able to have a debate. He says you think this way and I think that way, and that is a philosophical debate. He always has to assume the worst of motives.

One of his criticisms is the way this benefit is delivered it through private pharmaceutical benefit managers. We set up a system so various companies can compete in the marketplace to deliver low cost drugs to seniors. What we know is that they are going to want to be able to make some profit on this, so they will go to the drug manufacturers and negotiate hard. "You want me to cover your arthritis drug, you better give me a darn low price."

That is the way it works in the marketplace, and they get competition going between the various drug manufacturers to see who is going to give the lowest price. That is why we developed the system that way.

Interestingly enough, every Member of Congress who chooses to receive his or her prescription drug benefit through the Federal Government receives their benefits exactly the same way, private companies. We do not have a special agency full of Federal employees that dispense drugs to Members of Congress, or to the 8 million other Federal employees. Eight million Federal employees, it is shocking that there are so many, but 8 million Federal employees who are eligible to purchase a prescription drug benefit through the government program, they buy it using the exact same model that we have provided for the senior citizens, the exact same model.

Every man and woman in the United States military who participates in the military health programs gets their drugs the same way that we set up for the Medicare program.

Now, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) says no, that is not why you did it. You did not do it because it is efficient. You did not do it because you get the best prices. You did not do it because the private sector can instantaneously put a new drug into the plan, while the bureaucratic process would take months and months to add a new product. He says we did it because of contributions from the drug companies.

I am here to say, as one who has never received a contribution from a drug company, I did it because I believe it is the right philosophical thing to do, it is the right way to benefit the seniors of our country.

Again, Mr. Chairman, I am proud of you for your work on this, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak this evening.