John Spratt: “This whole debate began when the President sent us a budget and said let us do prescription drug coverage; there is a…”

“This whole debate began when the President sent us a budget and said let us do prescription drug coverage; there is a gaping hole in the comprehensive care we ought to provide in Medicare. And I absolutely agree with that. When the Republicans brought their resolution to the Committee on the Budget, they provided for prescription drug coverage in an iffy conditional kind of way. The usual procedure in a budget resolution, the one tool we have to get something done on the Committee on the Budget, is to impose reconciliation instructions on the committees of jurisdiction, to tell them by a date certain to report out language to the House floor so that we can act upon the purpose that we have set for ourselves. We, in our resolution on the Democratic side, did just that. We resorted to the time-honored tool of reconciliation and said to the Committee on Ways and Means and to the Committee on Commerce, reconcile the budget; here is $40 billion for the first 5 years, $155 billion over the next 10 years, establish a prescription drug benefit for Medicare. That is all we want to do today.”