Richard Burr: “As the gentleman from Pennsylvania knows, it is one thing to talk about catastrophic coverage, which is the ability to…”

“As the gentleman from Pennsylvania knows, it is one thing to talk about catastrophic coverage, which is the ability to look at the senior population and say the one thing that we can do is put the Federal Government where it should have been in health care, the safety net, and assure our seniors that if they ever spend out of pocket a certain amount of money in a given year that they will never be exposed for any more than a fixed amount, catastrophic coverage, a limit. It is one thing to talk about it; it is another thing to put it on paper and to pass the test of the Congressional Budget Office or the Office of Management and Budget and have that number scored. But we did it. We did it and we lived within the framework of the available money, and we provided a stop loss for seniors of $6,000. The President had a bunch of pieces of a plan, and he said he would like to incorporate stop loss or catastrophic loss, but the fact is that he could never do it in a way that he could put it on paper and have that paper scored because of the way he proposed designing the original plan, which was no choice, which got very little discount from the current price of pharmaceuticals in the marketplace.”