Don Nickles: “I don't know. I will just state to my friend that these are additional new costs. There may be some offsets. I mentioned…”

“I don't know. I will just state to my friend that these are additional new costs. There may be some offsets. I mentioned one possibility. You mentioned: Well, if they have the State drug program, that might be a savings. I didn't have that program. The only offsets I could see is if the Federal Government is taking over some of the catastrophic, and I don't see that hardly ever happening. So I think these are pretty accurate costs. I will be very interested maybe CBO will have a chance to do it. Maybe if we would legislate correctly and not just have a new proposal on the floor, we would have a chance for CBO to score it, not through e-mails saying that we think it is no new net cost but have them give a State-by-State. Then we could be more thorough in our analysis and in our description. And if someone highlights a couple of columns and leaves out a couple of columns, that can be brought out in the debate. Unfortunately, we did not have that time afforded to us the way this bill was brought to the floor and the way we were considering serious alternatives. I appreciate my colleague saying, wait a minute, maybe this is not complete. There should have been a column that shows some offsets. But I am absolutely certain that some States would lose millions upon millions of dollars, maybe in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And some States would be real net losers. There might be some that have some better reimbursement from the Federal Government.”