Sen. Dayton has a novel idea for members of congress (tit for tat)

[donsu]

http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/03/09/18_dayton.html

United States Senator Mark Dayton Has a Novel Idea: Members of Congress Should Receive a Drug Prescription Plan No Better Than Our Nation's Seniors Under Medicare

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Particularly galling to Dayton is a Bush administration/drug industry proposal to have Medicare offer "drug discount cards" until the new Medicare program is phased in (which is not going to be as good as Congress's, trust us). The card is basically a drug industry tool to keep track of senior medication purchases and help them MARKET to seniors. It's a pharmaceutical industry wet dream. (Those are BuzzFlash's words, not the Senator's.)

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Interview

SENATOR MARK DAYTON: It was in the spirit of my friend and former colleague, Paul Wellstone. I don’t know how the inspiration was transmitted to me, but it very much felt like something that Paul would propose. I had said during my campaign -- as the President had said during his and a majority of my colleagues, at various times, had said in their own pursuits -- that seniors ought to get benefits as good as those that members of Congress receive.

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What has happened to a lot of the seniors, particularly in organized labor -– those retirees who have some private pension coverage of prescription drugs –- they’re being warned that they may lose that. Employers may drop their coverage and their pension plans and put them on a much more inferior Medicare-based plan. The Congressional Budget Office says to me that as many as 4 million of the 12 million retirees now in the country who receive some private coverage through their employer would stand to lose that. Now there are a whole group of seniors who say something is worse than nothing. It used to be, something’s better than nothing. Now, for many, something could be worse than nothing.

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SEN. DAYTON: Well, that’s certainly a risk. Under the Senate plan, the monthly premium was $35 a month. The deductible was $275 a year. Compare that to what the VA is offering, which is a $7 co-pay per a 30-day prescription. That’s what they’re able to do, again by exercising their ability to negotiate the overall prices of these products down, and by other kinds of management devices. But that’s exactly what the Republicans wanted to avoid, and what the pharmaceutical industry wants to prevent -– efficient management of the Medicare expenditures for prescription drugs.
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[rucky]

1. They should also...

...take a pay cut to the average income of their respective states.

What if we challenge one congressperson to do that? Just one.

Monkeys will fly out of my butt, but gotta have a dream.

[Bandit]

2. But what would we do with all the monkeys?

;-)