Louise Slaughter: “Would every Member who is on the floor and who has read all 691 pages of this bill since it was made available at 1:30…”

“Would every Member who is on the floor and who has read all 691 pages of this bill since it was made available at 1:30 in the morning please raise your hand. I do not see any hands raised, but we are going to vote on it very soon. We are not doing a service to the American public by violating the rules of the House and not allowing this bill to be held over for 3 days, as required by the rules, so Members of Congress, and maybe even members of the public and the fourth estate, could read it, analyze it, and report it so we could better hear the opinion of the American people. But from what I know of it and the bits I have read, it is not much of a benefit, and it is not what seniors need. Americans pay more for U.S. manufactured, FDA-approved drugs than anybody else in the world. Our neighbors in Canada pay half as much, on average, for drugs manufactured in the United States of America. Now, how could that be? Well, the government of Canada bargains lower prices on behalf of Canadians. Well, maybe that would be a solution to the problem here in the United States: let us lower the extortionate price of drugs. Let us put the 40 million people in Medicare into a buying group, that would not cost anything, and let us negotiate lower prices.”