[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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