Judd Gregg: “I wanted to speak on a couple of issues. First is the underlying effort here to pass major legislation in the area of…”

“I wanted to speak on a couple of issues. First is the underlying effort here to pass major legislation in the area of assisting senior citizens, specifically, with the cost of their prescription drugs. I think we all understand very well that there has been a fundamental shift in the way medicine is practiced in our country, and it has been a positive shift. That shift is that we have gone from a society which had basically as its first line of defense for significant health concerns an invasive medical procedure using a scalpel, to a society which has as its first line of defense for major medical concerns the use of pharmaceuticals. This has been a revolution, a biotech revolution. As a result, it is not so much that pharmaceuticals have become more expensive--but not outrageously so, with respect to inflation and other costs--but they have become so much more aggressively utilized.”