News From…
Congressman Dennis Cardoza
18th Congressional District of California
Cardoza Offers Motion To Improve Medicare Prescription Drug Bill |
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Lawmaker Leads Effort To Reject Privatization of Medicare, Citing Compelling Statistics
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| FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE November 6, 2003 |
CONTACT: Bret Ladine (202) 225-6131 |
| WASHINGTON – Congressman Dennis Cardoza, D-Merced, today offered a motion to instruct House conferees on the Medicare prescription drug bill in an effort to prevent the privatization of Medicare and to aid the survival of safety net hospitals.
The House and Senate are currently working in conference to resolve differences in their versions of the Medicare bill. Negotiations have been bogged down for weeks, and the bill still contains flaws that many lawmakers, including Cardoza, find unacceptable. The motion to instruct is intended to provide necessary guidance to the conferees. "We are at a critical point on this legislation," Cardoza said. "The future of Medicare is being decided. It’s important that we make the right choices, and this motion reinforces what those choices should be." Of particular concern is the premium support provision in the House bill that would force traditional fee-for-service Medicare to compete with private insurance plans to provide coverage for seniors. This arrangement would cause premiums to rise substantially for those wishing to stay in traditional Medicare. A government actuary has found that under premium support, beneficiaries across the country would pay vastly different premiums by 2013. Seniors in Oregon and North Carolina would pay $58 per month, but seniors in San Joaquin County would pay $83 per month while those in Stanislaus County would pay a whopping $117 per month. "No one could possibly come up with a rational explanation to justify such a disparity," Cardoza said. "Premium support literally discriminates against seniors in the Central Valley." Other key issues are assistance for safety net hospitals and preventing scheduled cuts in Medicaid DSH (Disproportionate Share Hospital) payments. Those payments are the primary source of revenue for the safety net hospitals that incur losses in caring for uninsured and partially insured patients. A House-passed provision would largely eliminate scheduled cuts, but there is no guarantee that it will remain in the final version of the bill. "Preventing these scheduled cuts is absolutely essential to these hospitals’ survival," Cardoza said. "The cuts would be devastating to many hospitals in the Valley." Cardoza’s motion, which will be voted on tomorrow, instructs conferees to: ▪ Reject the House-passed premium support provision turning Medicare into a voucher program; ▪ Reject the Senate-passed provision providing $6 billion for privatization demonstration projects; ▪ Use the savings gained by rejecting the provisions above to improve Medicaid DSH (Disproportionate Share Hospital) payments to our nation’s safety net hospitals, including several in the 18th District; ▪ Insist on both the House-passed provision that largely eliminates severe funding cuts in state DSH payments and the Senate-passed provision that increases federal allotments for "low-DSH states," most of which are rural.
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