David Thomas: “I take the floor because I was off doing other business but listening to testimony that has been presented on this…”

“I take the floor because I was off doing other business but listening to testimony that has been presented on this floor; and if something gets repeated often enough and loud enough, people may begin to think that it is true. In depicting the proposal that has been offered for seniors and prescription drugs, much has been made of the fact that when you have limited dollar amounts and you want to write a program that benefits the greatest number of people, the logical way to write the program is to provide reasonable benefits so that most people who have small drug costs have a decent shared payment structure. In the House plan, that happens to be 80 percent government payment and, 20 percent individual. And for those who, through no fault of their own, have extremely high drug costs, above a certain point, 100 percent of those costs are assumed by the government, or the taxpayers. That is called typically a catastrophic plan. The question is, how much would it cost to provide sliding coverage throughout an entire range? ... That is flat-out not true.”