Tom Coburn: “I want to make two points just for the Record to those that might be watching this. Medicare did a prescription drug…”

“I want to make two points just for the Record to those that might be watching this. Medicare did a prescription drug benefit in 1988. The estimated cost was $4.7 billion. The actual costs, the 1 year that that was in place was $11.7 billion; that is how well we estimated the costs. So when we saw up here a cost of $353 billion over 10 years, we know at least it is double that, just by the track records. The other thing that I would make is the GAO has already stated, our accounting agency, that Medicare is not going to make it, unless we do some significant changes in terms of incentives and payments. How do we do that? We do not do that by adding significantly more costs to an already bankrupt program.”