Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to offer the Democratic substitute to the Republican prescription drug benefit.

Let me briefly explain our substitute. Unlike the bill before us, our substitute can be simply explained, because it is built on a simple, known, and effective model – Medicare itself. Just like seniors pay a voluntary premium for Part B medical costs like doctor visits, our bill provides for a voluntary Part D drug premium of $25 per month. For that, the Government will pay 80 percent of drug costs after a $100 deductible. And no senior will have to pay more than $2,000 in costs per year.

These are real numbers, not estimates or guesses. The $25 monthly premium is specified in the bill, and so are the benefits. Unfortunately, there is no such guarantee in the Republican bill.

On top of that, we will be arming seniors with the most potent protection from soaring drug costs. Banded together under the buying power of Medicare, we can begin to use the necessary bargaining power to rein in high drug prices. This is not price control; it is competition and bargaining that Republicans explicitly ban in their bill, leaving seniors at the mercy of pharmaceutical firm price gouging. We saw that the Government was effective in negotiating a competitive price for Cipro during the anthrax outbreak. Why shouldn’t we do the same for other essential drugs for seniors?

In contrast to our simple and effective prescription drug benefit, the Republican bill is not a drug benefit at all. It is yet another promise of "bribes" to private insurers in the hope that they will offer a drug-only benefit to seniors. Will they? Time and again they have told us "No."

Even if the insurers did participate, the benefits under the Republican bill are wholly inadequate. According to estimates, the bill will pay less than a quarter of seniors’ drug costs. Even worse, after the first $2,000 of drug bills, the plan will pay nothing toward the next $2,900 in drug costs, leaving a gaping hole in this so-called insurance plan.

I want each of you to imagine one of your constituents paying a monthly premium for a drug benefit plan, who finds out that after purchasing $2,000 of drugs through the month of April with partial help from the Government, will now have to pay the next $2,900 of drug costs all by themselves. And by the way, they have to keep paying the insurance company a monthly premium for nothing.

This all assumes the Republican plan will work. But I doubt it will. If it does, it will only be after massive subsidies to an already bloated HMO industry that comes back year after year asking for more money, while providing fewer services to patients, and leaving seniors high and dry when they decide to leave town.

So why do my Republican colleagues insist on this private-insurance model which is failing so miserably? Well, quite simply, they have a larger agenda – they want to privatize all of Medicare, and this is just another step. That is the only reason why seniors are not even given a choice of getting the benefit through their traditional Medicare server.

And why don’t they endorse our plan? Our plan is simple; it is comprehensive; and it is what our constituents want. They have raised just one issue: they say it costs too much. Well, I can tell you that we can afford it. It is just a matter of priorities.

To put the costs in perspective, we are told that our bill may cost $500 billion more than the Republican proposal over ten years. Well, this week our Republican colleagues will be voting for a bill to make permanent the repeal of the estate tax on the wealthiest people in this country. Budget estimates suggest that in the second decade when that permanent repeal kicks in, it will cost the Treasury $750 billion.

Let me put this choice another way. The cost of extending last year’s income tax cuts into the next decade will cost $236 billion in just 2012 alone. That is more than three times the estimated cost of the Republican drug benefit bill in that year. And here’s another number: extending all of last year’s tax cuts will cost $4 trillion in the next decade. It is just a matter of choices. Do we put our priorities on helping the wealthiest few in our society or on providing a needed helping hand to all of our seniors who need this help so badly?

And let us not forget that we will be helping ourselves at the same time. There are many wonderful prescription drugs on the market these days that allow us to control all manner of health problems. When someone cannot afford a drug, they may well find themselves in the hospital, and their costs and Medicare costs go even higher.

So, yes, this substitute is expensive. Seniors will spend $1.8 trillion on prescription drugs over the next decade. That is expensive. But we can do something about it. It is a matter of priorities.