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Mr. TURNER. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, I just want to follow up on the gentleman's comment about the big drug manufacturers' opposition to having any prescription drug coverage under the Medicare program. I think it is pretty apparent to

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   So they are afraid of any suggestion that there be any coverage for prescription drugs under Medicare, and the truth of the matter is, the problem that we have addressed in this legislation could be solved by the big drug manufacturers themselves. In fact, we know that most of our senior citizens understand that even the Government gets cheaper prices than they do. The Government is a big purchaser.

   We buy prescription drugs for our veterans that are prescribed for them through the Veterans' Administration health care programs, and if we could just get those kind of prices for our senior citizens, we could see prices go down 30 and 40 percent. So the big drug companies know that their pricing practices over the last few years, which have gotten worse and worse and worse in terms of the discriminatory nature of them, has been the cause of the legislation we have brought forward. If they really did what is right, they could solve the problem themselves, because they are the ones that set these discriminatory prices, which has resulted in our seniors paying the highest prices of anyone.

   Mr. ALLEN. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman is absolutely right. No one here created this price structure; the industry created this price structure. They have just decided that they are going to get whatever they can out of Canadians and Mexicans and HMOs and hospitals, and then they have decided that they would set prices so that the highest prices in the world are paid by seniors, especially those seniors who do not have any coverage for their prescription drugs, and that is 37 percent of all of the seniors in the country. And there is another 8 percent with really inadequate coverage.

   Mrs. THURMAN. If the gentleman would yield, that probably is going down, or that number is going up, because we have now just seen over the past couple of years the draw-out of the Medicare Plus programs, which are the HMO, Medicare programs that, in fact, had some kind of a prescription drug benefit, and many of those are being taken out of a lot of counties these days across this country. So we could potentially see that number go up.

   I think we ought to talk about this when we get into this opposition. We now have the facts out; we know that they are first in every possible way we can slice it, and then what happens to us is we get these comments being made to us: well, you know, if you do this, we are going to stop research, and we are going to stop people having a longer life because we won't have the research out there for this medicine, biotech. All of these folks are giving us these scare tactics. I think if either of the gentlemen can respond to this, or I certainly can, to kind of keep this going in a dialogue here, it is amazing what we found out with what happened in 1984 and what happened again in 1990 when some of these issues were brought up.

   I yield to the gentleman from Texas, Mr. TURNER.

   Mr. TURNER. Mr. Speaker, our Prescription Drug Task Force that we all serve on, we had a meeting a few months ago where we had a presentation from a gentleman who had done extensive research at a respected university regarding the pricing practices in other countries, and it was interesting to note that we in the United States were the only country in the entire developed world that does not have some restraint on pricing practices of big pharmaceutical companies.

   Well, that being the case, I guess it should be no surprise to us that we in the United States are paying the highest prices of anyone in the world for prescription drugs. I think there is going to come a point in time, and I think it is coming sooner than later, that the American people are going to rise up and they are going to say, we are tired of it. We are tired of subsidizing the prescription drug purchases of everybody else in the world, and we want some prescription drug fairness.

   So when we are looking at the data that clearly shows us that there is price discrimination worldwide working to our disadvantage and price discrimination within our own country, that is resulting in everyone at the retail pharmacy level paying the highest prices of anyone, I think it is time to wake up and for us to do something about it.

   Mr. ALLEN. Mr. Speaker, we probably should talk for a moment about the nature of the opposition and what is happening right now.

   Well, several things. People have probably noticed a set of television ads running all across this country featuring Flo. Flo is a bowler, and in these ads, she is urging us all to pay attention to what is going on in the debate on this issue and making it clear, as she said, that ``I don't want big Government in my medicine cabinet.''

   Now, if we want to know who pays for Flo, it is some group called the Citizens for Better Medicare. Well, here is one, here is a full-page ad run in a local paper here in Washington, and Flo is featured in television ads. Citizens For a Better Medicare is delivering a message, and that message is, we want the right kind of Medicare reform, and only the right kind of Medicare reform.

   Mrs. THURMAN. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, do we know who is paying for these ads?

   Mr. ALLEN. We do, Mr. Speaker. Guess who is paying for them? It turns out it is the pharmaceutical industry. Is that not surprising?

   What has happened is the coalition, it is called Citizens for Better Medicare, it includes the National Association of Manufacturers, the United States Chamber of Commerce, the United Seniors Association, and the National Kidney Cancer Association. The executive director of this coalition, until just recently, was working for PRMA, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. That is the industry association for the pharmaceutical industry.

   In this recent story, a person named Martin Corey, who works for AARP, was criticizing these advertisements and I quote what he said in this article in The New York Times.

[Time: 21:30]

   He said, ``This phony coalition, created and financed by the pharmaceutical industry, is what we have come to expect from drug companies over the last decade. Fundamentally, they are in favor of the status quo, which leaves millions of older Americans without drug coverage.''

   Now, I know that the gentlewoman from Florida (Mrs. THURMAN) has some points to make, but we really need to understand the role of money in politics. What the pharmaceutical industry is doing is taking this, and this is an industry that is near the top in lobbying contributions, it is near the top in campaign contributions, both money to candidates and soft money to the national parties. Now they are running up to a $30 million national media campaign basically to make sure that no discount approach is enacted and no Medicare prescription drug benefit is enacted by this Congress. This industry wants the status quo, or, alternatively, it wants to turn over Medicare to HMOs.

   I say to the gentlewoman from Florida (Mrs. THURMAN), she was just pointing out that as recently as July 1, 340,000 people in Medicare HMO plans were simply dropped by the plans because it was not economically profitable to cover them, just dropped. Millions of other Americans who were in these Medicare managed care plans are having their prescription drug benefits cut arbitrarily because the company is not making enough money, so they cut the prescription drug benefits. That is not a system that works for our seniors, and that is why we need to change it.

   Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Florida (Mrs. THURMAN).

   Mrs. THURMAN. I absolutely agree, Mr. Speaker. I do want to go back to this issue, because it kinds of goes along with Flo and others out there, other kinds of ads we are hearing about research.

   One of the things she mentioned in the very beginning was, I could not walk without pain, but thanks to new medicines, which gives us the connotation that there are not going to be any new medicines out there.

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   What we have found in some of this research was that in 1984 there was a piece of legislation called the Waxman -Hatch bill that in fact the pharmaceutical companies came in and said, you cannot do this because we are going to increase the availability of generic drugs, and if you do that, we are going to have more competition between brand name drugs, and we are going to have to cut research and development.

   In those years, if I remember these correctly, it went from $4.1 billion to $4.4 billion in that period of time from 1984 to 1990. Then, in 1990, we did a rebate program. In the rebate program, again the pharmaceutical companies came up and said, oh, no, you cannot do that, cannot do that. We are not going to be able to have research and development.

   Since 1990, we now went from $8.4 billion to $18.9 billion. But there is some more interesting information that has to go with that, and this cannot be overlooked. First of all, in the last four appropriations in the Congress for NIH, the funding in NIH has gone up more than any other budget in this country, by 5, 6, 7 percent, because we understand and believe there needs to be an investment in research. We understand that. We are not closing our eyes to the fact that we want good research in this country.

   Now, who is the recipient of this research? Who is the one who gets the contract after we give NIH the money to do the research? Pharmaceutical companies, can Members imagine? So they are actually taking some of the government money we are giving them for research and using it.

   The problem is, we never get any of that money back. No, they get a patent, and in that patent we extended it for 20 years, so we cannot even have any competition for these folks. So we have a pharmaceutical company that gets part of their funding from NIH.

   I happen to have a huge university in my district, the University of Florida, a teaching hospital. They are wonderful. They do great research. They have had on-the-cusp engineering research kinds of things they have done in medicine. They, too, then are helpful to the pharmaceutical companies.

   So it is not like they are having to come up with this research money on their own, they are actually getting help from their government, they are getting help from their university systems, both public and private, and they reap all of the benefit, and, according to the gentleman's chart over there, all of the profits.

   Then they come to us and say, oh, you cannot do any of this. We are going to keep gouging the most vulnerable people. I do not get it. I do not know why our colleagues are not on this piece of legislation, because this is just perfect kinds of stuff that prove that over and over again it becomes a spin game and who is going to win.

   I do not have $30 million to do an advertising campaign. The only voice that I have is the voice that was given to me as an elected official, and that is to bring this to the floor of the House to raise the consciousness level of this country and have them understand why this issue is so important, and the unfairness of what is going on in these price activities today.

   Mr. TURNER. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will continue to yield, I thought the gentlewoman brought up a very important point when the gentlewoman mentioned the patent law.

   I find it amusing to watch these ads featuring Flo that are paid for by the big pharmaceutical manufacturers, and Flo raises her finger and she says, I do not want government in my medicine chest. Well, the truth is, as the gentlewoman pointed out, government is in her medicine chest, because the laws of the United States protect those drug companies from competition because we, under law, grant them a 17-year-patent on their medicines that they are always up here fighting to get extended. That law guarantees them a monopoly over the drug that they have done the research to create and bring to the market.

   Frankly, I think that is a good law, because the purpose of the patent law is to encourage the development of new drugs, new cures, and we have seen many of them in recent years. In fact, back when the Medicare program was first put in place in the mid sixties, nobody thought about covering prescription drugs because it was a very small part of our total health care costs. But today prescription drugs are a major part of all of our health care costs, and that is why the problem we are talking about tonight is such a serious one for senior citizens, particularly those who are on fixed incomes.

   I think what I would like to do, if we had the millions of dollars that the big drug manufacturers have, I would like to put my constituent that I talked about earlier, Ms. Daley from Orange, Texas, on TV. She would tell a different story than Flo. Or the lady that I read the letter from just a few minutes ago, Ms. O'Leary, I believe she could handle herself in debating Flo.

   She is the one that said in her letter, ``What good is research and finding cures for diseases if a large part of our population cannot afford the medicine for the cure?'' I think the senior citizens of the country get it. I really never have paid a whole lot of attention to those expensive ads that featured Flo, because I think the people out there watching those ads are smarter than that.

   Mrs. THURMAN. If the gentleman will continue to yield, it is not just about seniors, Mr. Speaker. When we listen to the families of the seniors that are trying to put their kids through college or trying just to make a mortgage payment or have a car, who are having to help out, they do not want their parents sick. They do not want them to go without the medicine that is needed to keep their life sustained. They want their parents to be able to enjoy their grandchildren. They want them there. It is an important part of our whole family fabric in this country.

   But we are denying everybody a chance, then, through the family structure to enjoy their parents' last time in their senior years. So it goes way beyond just the seniors.

   I went to an editorial board meeting, just about this. It was very interesting, because the woman I talked to said to me, she said, I had this friend. She did not take her blood pressure medicine, and I asked her why. She said, my cat had to go to the veterinarian. As we got through the end of it, I found out it was her mother. She said, why didn't you call me? I would have gotten your medicine for you? But the mother was proud, did not want to take money. She was worried about her cat, so that was the decision she made. I know that may not be the choice that everybody would make, but certainly it was for her.

   So here is a daughter who is now having to help out or wants to help out, it is not even a matter of having to, and not because of those reasons, necessarily, but they all go through something like this.

   Mr. ALLEN. The people that we have been talking about tonight, our constituents, are real people. Flo is a fake. Flo is a TV ad. Flo is someone, a creation of the pharmaceutical industry. Flo means big bucks, and what Flo is trying to do is persuade people in this country that they do not want any government involvement in Medicare, which is a Federal health care program, if it is going to provide either a prescription drug benefit or a discount for seniors.

   The gentleman from Texas (Mr. TURNER), was saying that, after all, the government is involved in her medicine cabinet. The gentleman mentioned one way, but there are some other ways. The Food and Drug Administration in this country is there to make sure that the drugs that are sold by the pharmaceutical industry are, number one, safe, and number two, effective; that is, they work. That is what the purpose of the Food and Drug Administration is.

   We all want to make sure that continues, because if this industry were simply allowed to sell any drug, regardless of whether it had been tested and was assured to be safe or whether it was going to actually work, we would all be worse off.

   If Flo were a real person, she is one of a minority. She is one of the 28 percent of the people in this country who have prescription drug coverage through a retirement plan, but the rest of the population does not. Thirty-seven percent have no coverage at all. 8 percent have some coverage under a MediGap policy, but those are really pretty ineffective and not very cost-effective. Then there is 17 percent who have some sort of coverage, or used to, under Medicare managed care, but as

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   The bottom line, this is about money. The industry is charging the highest prices in the world to people who can least afford it. This is an industry which made $26 billion last year, $26 billion. Now they are spending millions of dollars of that money to try to persuade people in this country that we should not have a discount on prescription drugs and that we should not have a benefit under Medicare. It is an outrage.

   This system has to change. It is not sustainable. What our seniors are spending on prescription drugs is going up 15 percent a year. That is one reason the industry is so profitable. Yet, the industry is simply saying no to the kinds of changes that would make sure that people get the drugs, get the prescription drugs that their doctors tell them they have to take.

   Mr. TURNER. If the gentleman will yield, Mr. Speaker, the point the gentleman makes about the big drug manufacturers and the involvement they already have with government is an important one, because we are all very proud of the fact that the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, protects the prescription drugs that we purchase every day.

   I think most of us in the last analysis would support the policy of granting a patent to our big drug manufacturers to encourage them to make the necessary financial investment to come up with new drugs and cure serious diseases.

   But it just seems to me that in exchange for that protection under the patent law, that the big drug manufacturers owe us at least one thing back. That is, fairness in drug pricing. I am a firm believer in the free enterprise system. I believe that government ought to stay out of the business world as much as possible, because I believe in innovation and entrepreneurship.

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