Political Quotes

“we have a very simple message this morning. America's seniors now, for 37 years and 1 day--since 37 years ago yesterday was the day Lyndon Johnson signed the Medicare legislation into law--have been waiting for prescription drug coverage. It was a minor amount of their expenditures in 1965. On average, it was $65 a year. It is a staggering amount for seniors today--over $2,100 a year, on average. Today is the day that there are no more excuses for delay. There is no credible reason to vote against the motion to waive the Budget Act so that the Senate can then consider an affordable, bipartisan prescription drug proposal, and all of the modifications, amendments, and other alternatives that others might wish to propose. There have been a number of objections raised to our proposal--some of them last week--being contradictory to the same provisions or modifications that are in our current bill, and some new issues were raised this morning. Let me briefly comment. Last week, we heard that the prescription drug bill we had offered was too expensive, at an estimated cost of $594 billion for 10 years. We were told: we cannot support anything that is above $400 billion. So we went to work. We rolled up our sleeves, and we made a number of changes, and we have gotten the cost under $400 billion.”