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US House of Representatives

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                                                                         Contact: Ashley Westbrook
Thursday, August 2, 2001                                                                                                  (202) 225-3661

STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE ROSA L. DELAURO

“I want to draw your attention to the Republican Leadership’s failure on the issues most important to the American public.   The public made clear that a Medicare prescription drug benefit is a top priority.  Unfortunately, the prospects for enacting the legislation grow more remote every day.

“Medicare has made health care affordable for tens of millions of our nation’s seniors.  Since it was first established, the program helped reduce the number of elderly who are poor from 29 percent to 11 percent (according to the Health Care Financing Administration.)

“Today’s seniors face a new obstacle:  paying for expensive prescription drugs on a fixed income.  The cost of prescription drugs has skyrocketed in recent years  -- increasing an additional 20 percent last year.   And seniors have seen no relief.  Over 11 million seniors (one in 3) have no prescription drug coverage. One in 8 seniors have so little income that they must choose between basic necessities and their medicine -- a choice no one should have to make.

“Make no mistake about it, when this year began we had a real opportunity to move this legislation.  With the budget surplus as it was, Americans expected their government to deliver some of the basic services they had clearly stated they wanted during last year’s campaign. Candidates Bush and Gore both were for a prescription drug benefit.  However, the only thing President Bush and his Republican friends in Congress have been able to do is to obliterate the surplus making any major initiative impossible.  They passed a $1.35 trillion tax cut that gave most of the surplus away to the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans.

“It was their top priority -- it took precedence over the health of America’s families and seniors.  It was enacted before we even had a chance to consider helping America’s seniors with the high cost of prescription drugs.  And it left no resources to enact a meaningful prescription drug benefit in the Medicare program.

“President Bush and the Republican Leadership have put the health care of seniors today and tomorrow in jeopardy.  It is shameful.  America’s seniors deserve better and we must move the Medicare prescription drug benefit back to the forefront of our nation’s agenda -- even if it means scaling back this unfair tax cut.

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