Is this bill you have just called up and asked unanimous consent to move forward on paid for?

I yield 10 minutes to the Senator from Alabama. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alabama is recognized.

What happens to all this? What is the ultimate? The ultimate is failure of the insurance market.

I thank the Senator for his question. If you look at Thomson Reuters and several others who have studied the health care field, the estimate for defensive medicine costs is $250 billion a year. It is not just that we order tests that…

I think there are two reasons. One is because there is large support of those who wrote this legislation by those who benefit from suing doctors. That is pretty straightforward. And the doctor's only defense is to order tests which they…

Reserving the right to object. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma.

Mr. President, do I have time remaining? The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma still has time. The Senator from Oklahoma.

I would make the following point: The vast majority of Americans do not want their taxpayer dollars paying for this kind of drug for those kind of people. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Montana.

We got this 1\1/2\ minutes ago to see the language. You have an amendment on the floor that actually accomplishes everything you want to do. Why are we doing this? Because you do not want to mess up a package that is clean. It has every…

Mr. President, this amendment saves $6.5 billion over the next 10 years for what it does on fraudulent Medicaid prescriptions-- $6.5 billion--$650 million a year on fraudulent prescriptions. It also creates a prohibition so that erectile…

If I may, I would like to add one other thing here. Think about it. We are talking about the cuts that are set to go. But since there is no tort reform in this bill, we spend $250 billion on defensive medicine and liability costs continue…

That is everybody in this country who has private insurance, either through their employer or the individual market.

All I will tell you is, the best guess of CBO--wonderful people, but they can only make decisions within the parameters they are given. There is no question private insurance, individual and family insurance, is going to go up, but…

What it is going to do is exacerbate the cost shifting going on with Medicare and Medicaid right now, which means insurance rates for everybody else in the country are going to go up.

They are not going to find a doctor, and that is the whole problem. Whatever we see in the urban areas now, multiply it tenfold in the rural areas. We are going to increase eligibility for Medicaid to 133 percent of the poverty level, we…

Mr. President, what needs to be fixed in this bill is a whole lot more than that, but this is a great attempt to try to solve a problem. Let me describe a scenario, what is getting ready to happen. Every State is cutting Medicaid…

Yes, they will pay the fee. They will pay the tax and say it is easier. Consequently, the young people in our country, because we do not have a big enough payment under the ``individual mandate,'' are going to say it is smarter for me to…

This is a constructive amendment that saves millions and millions of dollars in Medicaid. The fraud in Medicaid prescriptions is out of this world. It can be fixed. This amendment will prohibit prescriptions for recreational drugs for…