Barbara Boxer: “The reason we voted against it is it does not do much for our seniors. It is very costly for them when they need it. It…”

“The reason we voted against it is it does not do much for our seniors. It is very costly for them when they need it. It is not there because after a certain amount of expenditure, the benefit stops. We call it benefit shutdown, donut hole--different names. Lots of us are trying to fix it. One of the main problems is what my friend described--a prohibition on the Medicare agency from negotiating with these giant drug companies for lower prices. If someone from the Government came up to one of our constituents who was looking for a new bike for their son and said, You cannot shop around, you have to take whatever that store on the corner says you have to pay, I do not think that would be very popular for the Government to do. Essentially, that is what we are doing here. We are essentially taking the leverage away from Medicare to help our seniors get lower prices by telling them, even though there are 40 million Americans-- that is my understanding--on Medicare, they cannot use that power and that leverage to sit across from Pfizer or any of the big companies and say: If you want to get on our formulary, you have to lower this price.”