David Thomas: “I, too, am anxious that we complete the work we have before us. We still have three important appropriations bills to…”

“I, too, am anxious that we complete the work we have before us. We still have three important appropriations bills to put together. I hope we can deal with respect to the issues and move away from some of what has happened, where we have sought, in some cases, to make an issue more than to reach a solution. In fairness to the Congress and to our associates, since Labor Day there has been a substantial amount of progress made. I will review some of it to assure you that we have been doing some very helpful and useful work. For example, repeal of the telephone excise tax: This was a tax that was implemented during the Spanish-American War on telephones. I suspect it had exhausted itself by this time and finally was repealed. The Safe Drug Reimportation Act, which, of course, is a part of a solution to pharmaceutical costs: In the case of Canada, for example, pharmaceuticals that are exported there are under price controls by the Government and therefore are less expensive than they are in the United States. This authorizes those drugs to be reimported and hopefully to be resold at a price less than what we have had in the United States.”