Peter Deutsch: “the House bill in front of us, as the ranking Democrat of our full committee has ably quoted the chairman of the…”

“the House bill in front of us, as the ranking Democrat of our full committee has ably quoted the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means in his own words, ``To those who say the bill would end Medicare as we know it, the answer is we certainly hope so.'' This bill is a nonstarter. The Republicans in the Senate oppose it. It will not happen. It destroys Medicare. I am going to take my 2 minutes and even talk about that. Mr. Speaker, I am going to talk about the disingenuous nature of the proposal that the Republicans are fostering at this point as a final product. And I say disingenuous because both this bill and that proposal does absolutely nothing about cost containment. How can they have a prescription drug bill that does nothing on cost containment? It is totally disingenuous. For real seniors, and I would encourage all of my colleagues to talk to seniors because one of the things that is going on in America today is we do not know the number. We just had the FDA in our committee again several times. We do not know the number of how many seniors are availing themselves of purchases through Canada by the Internet, but it is easily 10 million seniors. We have 10 million seniors who are purchasing drugs in Canada where the benefits of purchasing drugs in Canada far exceed any proposal the Republicans have made. Just because people are old, just because they are sick does not mean they are stupid. They are going to continue to purchase them.…”