Thank you, Chairman Bilirakis, for holding this hearing. I am pleased with the Committee’s interest in a Medicare prescription drug benefit. I am also pleased that today’s discussion will include the topic of additional protections for low-income seniors and people with disabilities. I think, however, that we would be neglecting our responsibilities as Members of Congress if we only provide drug coverage to low-income beneficiaries.

The best way to help low-income seniors is to help all seniors. All seniors are subject to the high cost of prescription drugs, and until we create a universal drug benefit, any senior is at risk of becoming low-income after spending all of his or her spare resources on needed medications.

Unfortunately, the President’s budget contains no universal Medicare drug benefit. All the President’s proposals concerning prescription drugs and Medicare are temporary measures designed to be implemented while Congress deliberates a universal drug benefit. I question whether we should be devoting our energies to temporary solutions, while ignoring the larger task at hand, particularly when the President’s partial solutions have so many drawbacks.

The President’s budget contains several proposals targeted towards low-income seniors, based on the belief that a universal drug benefit will take too long to implement. These proposals include state low-income assistance programs, "Pharmacy Plus" Medicaid waivers, and discount drug cards.

While state low-income assistance programs can provide some help, only a little over half of all states offer them. It could be three years before programs are up and running in the other half – about the same amount of time it would take to implement a universal benefit. Drug discount cards do not guarantee a discount on every drug, nor do they guarantee whether the specific drug a low-income senior needs will be available. And the Administration’s "Pharmacy Plus" Medicaid waivers merely allow states to penalize some low-income people to help relatively higher-income seniors.

The President’s budget includes one other temporary measure to provide assistance to low-income seniors. The Administration mentions that private plans have played an important role by offering drug coverage to seniors without supplemental insurance. However, instead of creating a Medicare prescription drug benefit for all seniors, the President’s budget proposes increasing payments to managed care plans so that they can provide drugs to the 15 percent of seniors enrolled in them.

The common themes in the President’s proposals are troubling ones – providing no guaranteed drug coverage for any senior, and conditioning what assistance seniors get and how much they pay on where they live. This is not the Medicare that seniors know and trust. This Committee should not support inadequate proposals that undermine all the principles that have made Medicare so successful.