Mr. Chairman, we have a crisis in this country and it needs to be dealt with on this bill. This amendment would provide for a real Medicare prescription drug benefit and save the Nation's taxpayers a minimum of $40 billion a year in the process. It would provide for continuous open enrollment for all of 2006 and lay any late enrollment penalties until 2007.

Currently, if a beneficiary misses the May 15, 2006 deadline, they will not have the ability to enroll again until November 15 of 2006. This means they will automatically be subjected to a 7 percent minimum penalty for the rest of their lives. This amendment would allow beneficiaries the option of changing plans once in 2006 if they have made a poor choice, and there is no possible way that they could have known it was a poor choice when they made it.

It would create a drug plan administered and run by Medicare. It would require the Secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate for drug prices on behalf of the American people of our seniors that are enrolled in the plan, and they are the greatest generation. They built the greatest Nation in the history of the world and they deserve better than what they are getting.

This would not do away with any of the existing plans. It would just provide a much better option. It would provide lower prices and it would provide these prices that at no cost to the government.

Our rural pharmacies are going broke because of this crazy Medicare part D bill that we have forced on our seniors and on our pharmacists. It is unfair. It is absolutely overpowering to know that our own government did this to good people. This amendment will fix that. And our seniors are still not getting the medicine that they need and deserve to stay alive, stay healthy and have a decent lifestyle.

Once again by independent sources it has been verified that this amendment, if only half the eligible people signed up, it would save the taxpayers $40 billion. If all of them were part of this plan, it would save $100 billion a year, and they would still get their medicine cheaper than what they are paying for it right now. It only makes sense that we do this for the greatest generation and for those wonderful seniors that thought they were going to get treated a whole lot better by their own government.

Mr. Chairman, the distinguished gentlewoman from Illinois said it just like it is. Our senior citizens deserve better. We can provide better drug coverage, better health care for our seniors in this country and save money at the same time.

It defies logic that we would not take this opportunity to see that the wonderful generation that built this great Nation, they went through the Great Depression, they fought World War II, and then in their senior years to be treated like this only because we had a Congress willing to serve the pharmaceutical industry and allow them to rob our seniors and the rest of the American people, for that matter, and the insurance industry.

This is an opportunity to right a great wrong. It is an opportunity to correct and fix the sorriest, most disgusting piece of legislation ever passed by the United States Congress; and I would ask that this at least be allowed to come to a vote.