Blagojevich Addresses Reporters

That was a program that we began back in, I believe it was late 2003 or early 2004, an idea that was brought to me by then-Congressman Rahm Emmanuel, who suggested that since the big pharmaceutical companies had a tremendous amount of sway with the FDA, that too many senior citizens were being forced to ration their medicine or couldn't afford to buy their medicine, and had to choose between whether they could afford their medicine or afford the groceries at the grocery store that they needed to live on, and that maybe we should try something different and go to Canada, and go to the place where you make the same medicines for the exact same companies. Only, if you have free and open trade and go to Canada, you can help our senior citizens save up to 30, 40, 50 percent on the cost of their medicine.

BLAGOJEVICH: We did that in Illinois, being the first state in America to defy the FDA and the big drug companies. And, I'm happy to say, we were joined by the state of Wisconsin, the state of Kansas and the state of Vermont. And a lot of senior citizens in Illinois have had the benefit of being able to afford their medicine at prices they can afford.

The House is impeaching me for that. Is that an impeachable offense?

I met a woman not long ago from the Humboldt Park area who was not feeling well, and was in a great deal of pain, so she went to see her doctor. And her doctor didn't know what was wrong with her. The best he could do for her was to prescribe Tylenol to ease her pain.

But then she came to one of our Pink Potluck programs in the Humboldt Park neighborhood. That's a program that we have to go out pro-actively and find women who don't have insurance and encourage them to get mammograms to screen for the possibility that they may have breast cancer.

This particular woman was at that Pink Potluck. And it was discovered after her screening that she not only had breast cancer, but it was stage 4 breast cancer.