Political Quotes

“the question is why should the Congress not just say to every retiree, everyone on Medicare, every beneficiary: we will pay 100 percent of all of your prescription drugs benefits. The answer is, in part as you said, the younger generation asked to pay that bill would be wiped out. But, secondly, two out of three seniors today already have a prescription drug benefit, many of them provided by their former employer. As I travel to the senior centers around my district I say, How many of you already have some kind of a prescription drug benefit? And there is a show of hands. How many of you receive them from your former employer? And a goodly number of hands go up. Usually, it is either the big Fortune 500 companies that were able to provide these generous benefits, or they worked for a governmental entity, a school district or a State or the Federal Government. If we moved in and started to pay all the prescription drugs, employers would drop that coverage like a rock and all of a sudden the two-thirds of the seniors who already have a benefit, albeit maybe not the perfect one and we might be able to supplement their benefits, but those would all of the sudden be shifted from the private sector to the public sector and be enormously expensive.”