Ron Kind: “Mr. Speaker, let us be clear on what we are trying to do here today. We are trying to help you. We are trying to help…”

“Mr. Speaker, let us be clear on what we are trying to do here today. We are trying to help you. We are trying to help find some cost savings on what was the largest expansion of entitlement spending in the last 40 years that was passed under your rule, with no ability to pay for it, all deficit financing, no cost-containment measures. All we are saying here today with H.R. 4 is let us give the Secretary of Health and Human Services the ability to go out and negotiate a better deal for the American taxpayer. And I, for the life of me, don't understand why any Secretary, with all due respect to Secretary Leavitt's article in the papers yesterday, would not want to have this negotiating authority in their arsenal. In fact, the last outgoing Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tommy Thompson, during a moment of unguarded candor, said after his resignation that the one thing that he regretted while serving as Secretary of Health and Human Services was 'I would have liked to have had the opportunity to negotiate.' And he based that on his success in negotiating better prices for Cipro and FluMist. The VA system is already negotiating better prices. It is working well.”