Dan Burton: “I admire our President and my leaders in the House, but I want to tell you why I oppose this bill. The average senior is…”

“I admire our President and my leaders in the House, but I want to tell you why I oppose this bill. The average senior is going to pay $4,000 in order to receive the first $1,500 in benefits. Now, we should take care of the 24 percent of seniors across this country that have no drug coverage; but this covers all of them, including the 76 percent that do have coverage. Employers will, in my opinion, in spite of a $70 billion payoff, drop their seniors and put them on the government program, and they are going to get less coverage than they have right now, and it will cost a lot more. This program is going to cost much more, in my opinion, than the $400 billion that we estimate. I think it will go as high as maybe a trillion dollars over the next 10 years. And, finally, there is no negotiation with the pharmaceutical companies on drug prices even though Americans are paying as much as five to 10 times more than they are paying in Germany and Canada and other places in the world; and that is just not right.”