Dan Burton: “we are going to be voting before the end of the week on probably one of the most sweeping reforms in Medicare in the…”

“we are going to be voting before the end of the week on probably one of the most sweeping reforms in Medicare in the history of the program, and it is going to involve prescription drug coverage for seniors. There is a lot of misunderstanding about the bill, mainly because the bill has not been reported out of the committee yet; but we have gotten a synopsis of the bill, and I think it is important to see what this is really going to do. Tonight, and I am going to be doing this every night, tonight I have a chart that shows what seniors will really pay on average. This is an average. If we look at the chart, the annual premium that seniors will pay every year is $420, and then they have a $275 deductible which totals $695. Then they will pay 25 percent of the next $1,925. The government will pay 75 percent, and that is a figure of $481. If we add those together, that is $1,176. And when we take out the amount that the senior is going to pay as opposed to what the government is going to be pay, for that $1,176, the senior will be getting $1,444. After that there is what they call the doughnut hole: from $2,200 to $5,044 there is no coverage. So seniors will be required to pay on average about $2,844. If we add the other costs I enumerated, we are looking at a total cost to seniors on an annual basis, if they get about $5,000 in expenditures, they will pay $4,020 and the government will pay $1,444 of the total figure.”