Sherrod Brown: “President Bush is in my home State of Ohio, campaigning for maybe the 25th time. He knows he has to spend a lot of time…”

“President Bush is in my home State of Ohio, campaigning for maybe the 25th time. He knows he has to spend a lot of time in Ohio because of what has happened to the Ohio economy since George Bush has been President. Ohio's lost one-sixth, one out of every six manufacturing jobs has left the State, some 170,000 manufacturing jobs every single month in the Bush administration; but as he travels throughout Ohio, he is going to stop in Dayton and do a little program, Ask President Bush, and the members of the Ohio delegation put a list of questions we would like to ask the President about the new Medicare prescription drug discount card that the gentleman from New Jersey asked about earlier. I would like to go through some of these questions, hoping, as we pose these to the President and wrote him a letter, that we can get answers to them. We asked the President, is it true that the Medicare law allows drug and insurance companies offering discount cards to change covered drugs and discounts weekly? Does this not mean that seniors may choose a card one week and pay for it and be stuck with it for a year that will be worth little or nothing to them the next week? We ask, if seniors are guaranteed discounts that last as little as 1 week, why must they sign up for a discount card for the entire year and only that discount card? The $600 annual benefit will mean a lot to very low-income seniors, but this benefit lasts only 2 years.…”