Political Quotes

“I understand the point which the Senator from New Mexico is trying to accomplish. We do this in Pennsylvania. We do not have an asset test for our PACE Program. If you asked anybody up there now, Pennsylvanians dealing with this PACE Program, with the budget shortfall, one thing they would like to have put back in the box is this asset test. You could have, conceivably, somebody who has a $1 million house and has all their investments in a house or has other assets that are not income producing and they could qualify for a very rich drug benefit under this amendment. It really does encourage people to put their money into nonproducing assets to qualify, particularly those who are sick, to qualify for a drug benefit. I just think these asset tests are a way of recognizing that income is not the only measure of what you can afford to pay when it comes to drugs. We have to look at what people own and the assets they have. You can have someone who has very high asset value and very low income. We run into that all the time. That is the reason we have a variety of different taxes, to make sure we get at different ways in which people accumulate wealth and hold assets or live off income.”