I thank Chairman Bilirakis for holding today’s hearing on a very important subject, providing a prescription drug benefit for Medicare beneficiaries. I also thank all of the witnesses for joining us today.

Congress has now spent a number of years debating how to add a prescription drug benefit to Medicare. While everyone agrees we need to act, there is a fundamental divide over how. This gulf is over not just the stewardship of a prescription pharmaceutical program, but over the stewardship of Medicare itself.

The issue at hand today is what role the government and the private sector should play in delivery of a prescription pharmaceutical benefit and more broadly in the Medicare program. I am very concerned about the "magic of the marketplace" approaches that President Bush and the House Republicans would foist on Medicare.

We often hear that the private sector is more efficient than Medicare and therefore we should turn our seniors’ health over to private companies. I question whether the private sector is more efficient, and there are other concerns aside from efficiency that we should have at the forefront when thinking about Medicare -- quality, equity, stability, and compassion -- something that private companies are not always in the business of providing.

Moreover, it’s not at all clear that private companies are more efficient than Medicare. Even after adjusting for coverage of comparable services, Medicare’s cost-containment performance has been better than that of private insurance over the past 30 years. And, current evidence suggests that neither managed care nor competition are likely on their own to generate sufficient savings through efficiency to address the baby boom’s coming retirement and demands created by the growth in technology.

If we want to reshuffle the future economic burden imposed by demography, we should have a meaningful discussion on that very point. Those who believe we should no longer honor our commitment to provide comprehensive, affordable health care for our elderly and disabled should come forward and say so -- and we should discuss how it is that the elderly and disabled will meet their health care needs. But, people should not hide their true intentions under the guise of buzz words like "competition" and "choice." Those words are merely euphemisms for limiting government assistance, shifting more costs onto seniors by forcing them into private insurance plans, and leaving the plans to make key decisions about seniors’ coverage and out-of-pocket costs.

I do not disagree that there are certainly some things that private sector businesses are good at, but I am not sure that we can trust them to act in the best interest of our family’s health or our own health when it runs counter to Wall Street and shareholders’ interests.

I do not believe we need to completely upend the Medicare program and send seniors and those with disabilities to an untried, untested private insurance model. I believe that we can and should rely on the dependable program that seniors and the disabled have counted on for almost 40 years now.

In closing, I look forward to hearing from the witnesses today and I hope that we can bridge our differences and provide seniors a dependable, stable, affordable, comprehensive prescription drug benefit this year.