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| Restoring Medicare's guaranteed benefits Summer
2004 Medicare is the primary health insurance policy for almost all Americans age 65 and over and people with long-term disabilities. Growing numbers of working families and retirees are raising their voices every day in support of protecting Medicare by restoring its traditional health insurance benefits. On December 8, 2003, President Bush signed a Medicare law that immediately ushered in the greatest change to the health insurance program in 38 years. While proponents of the Bush Medicare Law have focused on the new Medicare drug benefit, there are many other issues of life-and-death importance to people currently receiving Medicare benefits. The important fact most Americans do not know and realize is that, when fully enacted in the year 2010, the new Bush Medicare Law dismantles its guaranteed health insurance benefits and weakens healthcare security for workers and retirees. The Bush Medicare Law is a classic "bait-and-switch" scheme. It promises to continue health insurance benefits but accomplishes its goal by investing billions of taxpayer dollars in an effort to lure workers and the elderly away from the traditional Medicare system into privately-run health insurance plans. These new privately-run plans allow employers, HMOs, private insurers, and drug industry profiteers (not workers and retirees) to direct workers' and retirees' healthcare choices. The Bush Medicare Law unravels Medicare's program structure through privatization. It does not control future health care inflation costs. It ends Medicare's universality by imposing a first time "means test" on beneficiaries' income. The Bush Medicare drug plan does not provide an affordable prescription drug benefit, and it leaves new gaps in retiree prescription drug coverage. It does not protect retirees who currently receive drug benefits from their former employers. This ill-advised Bush Medicare law happened in large part because the President allowed HMOs and drug industry campaign contributions, as well as conflicts of interest by the AARP, to corrupt and hijack the Medicare debate. As a result, the country is stuck for the present with a Bush Medicare Law that allows employers, HMOs, private insurers, and drug industry profiteers to have too much control over an individual's healthcare choices. Now, President Bush and his Wall Street allies - led by Alan Greenspan -- promise a major political effort next year to privatize Social Security and take away its guaranteed benefits to pay for permanent federal income tax cuts. Medicare's and Social Security's guaranteed benefits matter to our families, our retirees, our future, and us. We need to protect both programs. We don't have to abandon their confirmed benefits to strengthen them. We demand that our congressional representatives act now to restore and protect Medicare's guaranteed health insurance benefits before the Bush plan is fully implemented. We demand that our congressional representatives act now to strengthen Social Security, not privatize it! It's not too late! |
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