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Medicare Turns 44, Seniors Push for Health Care Reform |
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Seniors and health care activists across the country are celebrating the 44th birthday of Medicare today by lobbying for improvements to the program and expanding quality, affordable health care for all.
In more than 30 events in 17 states across the country, members of the Alliance for Retired Americans are honoring Medicare’s success and outlining a positive agenda for comprehensive health care reform legislation that will help current and future retirees.
Thousands of Alliance members are holding birthday parties, sending letters to the editor to their local newspapers and visiting the local offices of lawmakers to call for real health care reform, not cosmetic changes.
Calling Medicare “a great American success story,” which has helped reduce senior poverty by two-thirds, Alliance Executive Director Ed Coyle says:
It is unfortunate that some are seeking to derail health care reform through misleading and divisive attempts to scare seniors. The truth is that several leading proposals on Capitol Hill would actually make it easier for retirees to see a doctor, get a prescription filled, or afford long-term care. It is time for Washington to move beyond these worn-out tactics of divide-and-conquer and instead help millions of Americans in need.
Last month, Alliance members made more than 200 visits to their representatives on Capitol Hill. Specifically, the Alliance members are seeking legislation that:
- Helps early retirees buy into Medicare coverage.
- Closes the Medicare Part D “donut hole,” which forces about one in four seniors to spend several months each year paying full price for their prescriptions while still having to pay their premiums. Last year, according to the Alliance, an estimated 3.4 million of the 24 million Part D enrollees paid the $4,050 in out-of-pocket expenses before Medicare kicked back in and provided catastrophic care coverage, paying 95 percent of those prescription costs.
- Makes long-term care affordable through a public insurance plan.
- Continues tax policies that encourage employers to provide retiree health benefits.
- Creates a “public plan” option that provides affordable coverage and puts healthy pressure on private insurance companies to keep their premiums and business practices in check.
“Not only do retirees have a lot at stake in the health care debate,” Coyle says,
but we also worry about our children and grandchildren in these difficult times. If we work together, we can create a health care reform plan that helps Americans of all ages.”
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Dear Sisters and Brothers -
On this the 44th anniversary of Medicare something is amiss in Washington, D.C. More to the point, there is an illegal auction taking place. Politicos are in the process of holding the world’s largest [rigged] garage sale. Health care justice is being pawned-off and the medical-profits industry is the highest bidder.
Take action. Stop Congress from selling out the well-being of America’s working class.
The only piece of legislation that will guarantee affordable, quality, accessible, comprehensive, universal health care is HR 676, a national single payer public health insurance program like Medicare, only better. Tragically, it is not even under consideration. The medical-profits industry has seen to that. They got to the garage sale before it was open to the public. They greased the palms of auctioneers (otherwise known as politicians). Now all that is left are very expensive hand-me-downs that are much too small.
Medical insurance companies, for-profit hospitals, and the pharmaceutical industry lavished $2.2 billion on Washington, D.C during the last decade and their “investments” have reaped huge dividends. No “health care reform” bill currently under consideration will change that. Profit-takers will continue piling up huge windfalls while people go on dying.
So what will it be? Will we finally demand representation from elected officials, or will we continue to allow ourselves to be ruled?
Take action! The life you save may be your own! For more information go to Healthcare-NOW.org
Please sign these 3 health care petitions.
http://bit.ly/drug_benefit
http://bit.ly/HR676
http://bit.ly/single_payer_ross
Rich A. is right on! Nothing less will than “Single Payer” will meet the needs of working people and at the same time will be more affordable, cover everyone, by eliminating with corrupt corporate profiteering.
The organized labor movement, the AFL-CIO, at this critical time while Congress is in recess, to reconsider this most important issue to the well-being and even survival of all working people.
PLEASE AFL-CIO! ASSUME YOUR LEADERSHIP ROLE OF CONCERN FOR ALL WORKING PEOPLE AT THIS TIME OF HEALTH CARE CRISIS! PLEASE ANNOUNCE YOUR SUPPORT AND VIGOROUSLY CAMPAIGN FOR THE “SINGLE PAYER” REFORM OF HEALTH CARE!
Here is an article worth reading to understand the ramifications of the Obama administration’s attack on the standard of living of the American people.
Obama’s health care counterrevolution
28 July 2009
Kate Randall and Barry Grey
(Please read the full article here:)
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jul2009/pers-j28.shtml
(a couple of paragraphs from article…)
The New York Times is spearheading the campaign for President Obama’s health care proposals. His drive for an overhaul of the health care system, far from representing a reform designed to provide universal coverage and increased access to quality care, marks an unprecedented attack on health care for the working population. It is an effort to roll back social gains associated with the enactment of Medicare in 1965.
It is a counterrevolution in health care, being carried out in the profit interests of the giant pharmaceutical companies, insurance conglomerates and hospital chains, as well as the corporations, which will be encouraged to terminate health care for their employees and force them to buy insurance plans providing less coverage at greater out-of-pocket expense.
…
This describes the failure of a health care system based on private profit.
…
In other words, “middle-income Americans,” i.e., the vast majority of the population, will see an immense decline in their coverage. That is not all. People who presently assume that tests, drugs and procedures will be covered by their company plans will suddenly be told that a host of things are no longer covered and will cost extra to receive.
…
The immense growth of social inequality and the domination of society and the political system by a financial aristocracy are incompatible with institutions and programs that retain any vestige of a democratic and egalitarian impulse. Public education and health care must be reorganized more openly and directly along class lines.
This is the basic program of all factions of the ruling elite—liberal and conservative, Democratic and Republican.
…
now all we need is to have washington to pay back the trillions of dollars they have taken out of the s.o.s funds then we will be just fine
When this is all over, a watered down “reform” bill will emerge and well..business as usual. Can’t believe only 95% of the uninsured will be covered IF a public option survives. Shame n the AFL-CIO for holding the coat tails of HCAN and following them when HR 676 has been endorsed by 555 union organizations in 49 states including
130 Central Labor Councils and Area Labor Federations and 39 state
AFL-CIO’s.
Published on Thursday, July 30, 2009 by The Nation
Squeeze Insurance Profiteers, Not Medicare
by John Nichols
At a critical moment in the tense health care debate — when the U.S. House and Senate are scrambling to forge compromise reform plans that might be passed before the Congress embarks upon its traditional August recess — President Obama is retooling his health-care reform message.
Instead of the bold rhetoric of last year’s campaign, or even of last month’s press conferences, the president is now pitching reform as more of a consumer-protection gambit.
“No one is talking about some government takeover of health care,” Obama explained to the crowd at his latest town hall meeting in North Carolina on Wednesday.
Rather, the president argued that his reform vision would make insurance companies more responsible.
“We have a system today that works well for the insurance industry, but it doesn’t always work well for you,” Obama told 2,000 people gathered in a Raleigh high school gymnasium. “What we need, and what we will have when we pass these reforms, are health insurance consumer protections to make sure that those who have insurance are treated fairly and insurance companies are held accountable.”
Obama wants to do this by:
* requiring insurers to set annual caps on how much they can charge for out-of-pocket expenses,
* requiring insurers to fully cover routine tests to help prevent illness,
* requiring insurers to renew any policy as long as the policyholder paid the premium in full,
* barring insurers from refusing coverage because of pre-existing conditions, scaling back insurance for people who fall very ill, charging more for services based on gender and/or placing limits on coverage,
* barring insurers from denying children family coverage through age 26.
These are pretty good ideas.
Unfortunately, they tinker around the issue of affordability — the great challenge for tens of millions of Americans who have access to health care but lack the resources to pay for the coverage they need.
For those who would seek to control costs in a responsible manner, the dangerous trend in the health-care debate at this point is toward schemes that would see the federal government providing money to low-income families so that they can buy care from high-income insurance companies.
That’s nothing more than a giveaway to insurance companies. And it will not control costs.
In fact, if the Medicare “reform” experience of recent years is an indicator, the likelihood is that costs will skyrocket as insurers hike prices to pay for advertising and maintain excessive profits. And how much does anyone want to bet that the advertising will highlight the “services” they are required to provide by Obama’s consumer protections?
Whenever anyone talks about controlling health-care costs, the important thing to remember is that private, for-profit insurers drive costs up in order to make money.
That’s what’s maddening about the focus of so much of the congressional negotiation that is currently going on.
As Obama’s message illustrates, some attention is being paid to the problem of insurance companies that collect money from healthy people and then refuse to care for sick people.
That’s good.
But scant attention is being paid to the problem of insurance companies that charge Americans — be they well or ill — too much.
Instead, in order to draw support from conservative “Blue Dogs” and corporatist “New Democrats,” congressional leaders are talking about putting the screws to Medicare — a public program that is popular and that actually delivers care to tens of millions of Americans.
Congressional officials tell the Associated Press that Senate Finance Committee chair Max Baucus, D-Montana, has reportedly forged a tentative agreement with wavering Democrats and supposedly moderate Republicans in the Senate to cut “squeeze an additional $35 billion out of Medicare over the next decade and larger sums in the years beyond.”
“Under the plan,” AP is reporting, “an independent commission would be empowered to recommend changes in Medicare annually, to take effect automatically unless Congress enacted an alternative… The commission would be required to recommend $35 billion in savings over a decade from Medicare.”
When used by Washington insiders to describe changes in how a safety-net program, the word “savings” usually translates as “cuts.”
So, as of today, health care “reform” is shaping up as scheme to impose consumer protections on insurers while squeezing Medicare with cost controls that will be implemented not by Congress but by an “independent commission.”
Honest reform must include consumer protections. But that’s just a starting step.
The question remains: What will be done to make coverage affordable?
Here’s a notion: Instead of setting up an independent commission to squeeze Medicaid and Medicare, how about an independent commission to squeeze insurance company profits?
Here’s an even better notion: Instead of trying to make insurance companies do the right thing, why not set establish a single-payer program that takes as its mandate the coverage of all Americans in a system that controls costs by operating on a not-for-profit model?
After all, that’s what a wise legislator said when he was asked about controlling costs while delivering health care to all Americans.
Here’s what he said.
“I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that’s what [single-payer advocates are] talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see.”
The legislator’s name was Barack Obama.
© 2009 The Nation
John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation and associate editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. A co-founder of the media reform organization Free Press, Nichols is is co-author with Robert W. McChesney of Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy - from The New Press. Nichols’ latest book is The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders’ Cure for Royalism.