Sherrod Brown: “the President has been bringing Members to the White House today and lobbying them, and I also know the President this…”

“the President has been bringing Members to the White House today and lobbying them, and I also know the President this week has raised a lot of drug company money and insurance company money. The President is using the power of the Presidency trying to get people to pass this. And from the reports coming out of the meetings from Members whom I have talked to, in both parties, the President is not talking about the details of the bill. He is just saying you have to do this for me. We need a prescription drug benefit. Seniors deserve it. But he is not doing the math for them. If every Member of Congress tonight, tomorrow morning, before we vote on this tomorrow during the day would sit down and calculate, listen to the discussions like this and calculate individual numbers about what seniors are going to get, and then would look at what drug prices are, as the gentlewoman from Ohio pointed out, what drug prices are in Canada, France, and Germany, what they are in the United States, and how this bill does nothing about that, and then look at how this bill privatizes Medicare in 2010, I think Members, particularly if they began to listen to what people at home are saying, would have a very different take on this bill, no matter what the President said, no matter how many campaign contributors that Republican leadership and the President of the United States want to honor by passing this legislation.”