Political Quotes

“reclaiming my time, as we have discussed a little bit, there have been criticisms of the plans. And one of those criticisms has been, what part of the debate has been, what are we really going to do to lower the cost of prescription drugs? A lot of the debate and rhetoric that we have heard about this issue has been focused on strictly the cost of prescription drugs, how do we bring down the cost of prescription drugs. There are those who think that the answer to that question is to have some sort of governmental price controls on prescription drugs. That is a pretty scary proposition, because once we start down the road of price controls in a free enterprise market like the American system, we run the risk of killing the very industries that are providing these miracle drugs. So how do you do it? Well, the answer is that, for that one-third of the Medicare beneficiaries, the elderly and the disabled who do not have this coverage today, that one-third walks into a drug store with the prescription, they have an illness, they have an ailment, they are suffering from something, they go to their doctor, their doctor writes a prescription for them, they take that prescription, they go into the drug store, and they have to pay full retail price out of their pocket with nobody's helping them at all. Of course that is the most expensive way one can buy a prescription drug.”