Sherrod Brown: “We know this bill has been an absolute payoff to the drug and insurance industries. We know how this bill became law. We…”

“We know this bill has been an absolute payoff to the drug and insurance industries. We know how this bill became law. We also know what we could do to fix it, and we would offer again tonight, because we should not come down to the floor and only criticize, we really should offer constructive solutions. We should have reimportation. We should run the Medicare prescription drug bill through traditional Medicare, not farm it out to insurance companies, and then have to subsidize those insurance companies to 'incentivize' them to offer the prescription drug benefit. With reimportation, we also ought to be able to use the buying power of the Federal Government on behalf of 41 million Medicare beneficiaries to get the price down so that people could simply open up their purse or their billfold and pull out their Medicare card and go to the local drug mart in Elyria, Ohio and get a price that is 50 or 60 or 70 percent less than we have today. We can do this if we have the political will.”