[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 106 (Friday, July 31, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H6871-H6872]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    HEALTH CARE PROPOSAL FOR SENIORS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Vermont (Mr. Sanders) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SANDERS. Mr. Speaker, I want to alert Members about a very 
disturbing proposal recently offered by the chairman of the House 
Committee on Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health. This proposal would 
charge senior citizens in this country an $8 co-payment for Medicare 
home health care visits. At present, as you know, these visits are now 
without cost for the patient.
  Mr. Speaker, in my judgment, if this very terrible proposal were ever 
passed into law, and let us make sure that it is not, it would cause 
enormous pain and hardship for some of the weakest and most vulnerable 
people in this country, low income and sick elderly people. Why, in 
God's name, would we be making life more difficult for so many people 
who today are finding it difficult just to pay their bills?
  Mr. Speaker, as you know, nearly half of all senior citizens in our 
country have incomes of less than $15,000 a year, and about 12 percent 
of them live in poverty.

                              {time}  1530

  Many of them today are finding it extremely difficult to pay their 
bills, to

[[Page H6872]]

provide for their prescription drugs and to take care of their other 
basic necessities of life. These are not the people that we should be 
going after and making life more difficult for. The thought of forcing 
sick, fragile, low-income seniors to pick up a new cost which for 
someone requiring home health care visits 7 days a week could run as 
high as $2,500 a year is literally beyond comprehension. Does anyone 
really think that a sick, needy senior citizen with an income of 
$10,000 a year should be asked to pay an additional 6 percent of his or 
her entire income on health care costs?
  And what about some seniors whose incomes may be even lower than the 
national average. What an outrage to go after low-income senior 
citizens who are sick, who are fragile, who need home health care 
visits and tell those people that you have got to pay substantially 
more for your health care needs.
  Mr. Speaker, what I find particularly obscene about this proposal is 
that it comes one year after the so-called balanced budget agreement 
which cut Medicare by $115 billion and most of those savings went for 
tax breaks for the very wealthy. Three-quarters of the tax breaks went 
to people making $100,000 a year or more. So what Congress did last 
year is cut Medicare, give huge tax breaks for the rich, and then this 
year the chairman of the relevant subcommittee is saying, ``Gee, we 
don't have enough money for Medicare. I guess we're going to have to 
ask low-income sick seniors to pay more for home health care visits.'' 
This is the Robin Hood proposal in reverse. We take from the poor and 
some of the most desperate people in this country and we give to some 
of the wealthiest. This is a proposal that I would hope would be dead 
on arrival.
  Mr. Speaker, 22,000 Vermonters receive home health care in my State. 
But with last year's Medicare cuts, many are in danger of losing 
services through the reduction of payments to efficient home health 
care agencies that exist in Vermont and a number of other States. In 
other words, what Vermont was penalized for is having an efficient, 
cost-effective home health care visitation program. What we should be 
doing is correcting that absurd formula, making sure that more money 
goes throughout this country to help agencies like the Visiting Nurses 
Association provide the quality health care and home visits that they 
have been doing. We should not be making a bad situation even worse.
  Mr. Speaker, I believe that if members of both parties alert the 
chairman that this horrendous proposal is unacceptable, it will never 
get off first base, and that is what we should be doing.

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