Karen Thurman: “here is another issue, and this hits everybody. This is not just a Medicare patient, this is now starting to hit…”

“here is another issue, and this hits everybody. This is not just a Medicare patient, this is now starting to hit families, working men and women across this country. I actually got the first taste of it about a year ago when a major corporation came in to talk to me about this. They were talking about health care costs going up. I said, Tell me what that means. They said, Well, our prescription drug benefit is going up so high and the cost of the drugs are getting so high that we have a couple of choices now. We can either reduce the benefits of a prescription drug, or we can no longer or we will not be able to actually do coverage of other areas of health care. Mr. Speaker, if a business had a plan where they were given some dental or they might have been given some mental health or they might have had for their child an ear examination or a woman might have had a pap smear, mammography every year, now they are changing those plans to meet the needs in the prescription drug part of it, and they are now cutting back on the other benefits of these plans. It is all because of one area within health care that is really pushing this up. That worries me because here we are talking about all of the uninsured, the 44 million people that are uninsured. We are trying to find ways in this Congress to actually make it easier and beneficial to employers to provide health care.”