Ron Wyden: “we all have seen the frustrations and the heartache that senior citizens have experienced over these last few months as…”

“we all have seen the frustrations and the heartache that senior citizens have experienced over these last few months as the prescription drug legislation has gone into effect. Certainly, some folks are being helped, and we are glad to see it. But in order to really make a prescription drug benefit work, we have to contain the costs of medicine. That is what Senator Snowe and I are trying to do. We are trying to do it by using marketplace forces, not Government but marketplace forces to hold down the cost of medicine. A majority of the Senate is now on record as favoring this proposal. A majority of the Senate voted for it last fall before all the headaches and the frustrations that seniors have experienced. So in my view, the case is a lot stronger today than it even was last fall when a majority of the Senate voted for it. I think that is the reason the American Association of Retired Persons has written to the Senate saying they are in support of the bipartisan Snowe-Wyden legislation. They have something they call their Rx Watchdog group. It is an effort by AARP--a very laudable effort--to monitor the cost of medicine. They report that the cost of medicine is going up twice the rate of inflation. Of course, we know older people use more medicines than the rest of the population. It would be one thing if people were trying to go about doing this in an arbitrary kind of fashion, using a one-size-fits-all Government approach or price controls.…”