McDermott Comments on Proposed
Medicare Legislation
For Immediate Release - November 17, 2003

This week is one of the most important weeks that I have seen in the 16 years I have been in the Congress because we are dealing with an issue that is about the question of what is in the common good.

Congressman McDermott speaks to KUOW about upcoming vote on the future of Medicare.

We have no problem in this country believing that fire departments and police departments and road systems and schools are issues of the common good. We all pay our taxes. We all get benefits from them, and we have since 1964 had a program in this country called Medicare which was a program in which everybody put their money and people over the age of 65 took out their money to pay for health care benefits when they needed them. Everybody got the same thing everywhere in the whole country.

But there have been people in this Congress who have always thought that the idea of doing something collectively was somehow, I do not know, socialism or something bad. I do not know. They believe that everybody should be individually responsible for themselves, that they should be on their own and that they should deal with these things in a market, like they were buying cars or buying refrigerators or television sets.

So we have a bill before us that is going to undo what we have had in this country for senior citizens for the last 38 years. They have been waiting. They have been trying to do this for 4 or 5 years.

I was on the Medicare commission. One of the Members of the other body and the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Dingell) of this body and I represented the Democrats on that commission, and we managed to hold off the disaster which is being foisted on the senior citizens and the country itself in the next week.

This attitude about the common good really began to be undermined under Mr. Reagan. It was his campaign slogan in 1980: Are you better off than you were 4 years ago? Not are "we" better off than we were 4 years ago, but are "you."

This bill is going to say we are going to guarantee a premium support to every senior citizen in this country; we are going to write them a check, $5,900, $6,000, $6,300, whatever; and we are going to say now you, grandma, take that check out and find yourself an insurance company that will take care of what your needs are. You can stay in the program of Medicare as we know it, but since the healthy and the least sick will go out and find these good deals somewhere, who will be left in the regular program? The old and the sick.

The price per person is going to go up, so they are going to raise the premium on anybody who stays in the regular program. Is that thinking about the common good, that we are going to pick on the ones who are the old and the sick, and we are going to let the young and the healthy seniors go off and make a good deal somewhere? No, it is not. It is wrong, it is un-American, and it is undermining the whole concept of Medicare.

The idea that all seniors put their money into the pot, nobody sits around in this country and says, gee, I hope I get sick so I can use some money out of the pot. There is nobody that crazy in our country. Everybody wants insurance there when they are sick and particularly they want to feel independent, they have taken care of it themselves. It is not their children that have to do it or their grandchildren.

My father died a couple of years ago at 93. My mother is 93, and we four kids in my family have not had to spend anything on our mother's health or our father's health. Like every American, we pay our taxes into the pot, and they have taken out when they needed to; and that has gone on over the entire country.

What they are saying in this bill is send your mother out and let her pick her own plan. That is wrong; and as we watch this debate, understand that is what they are saying to every senior citizen. Here is your money; good luck, Grandma; I hope you find something for yourself.

I hope every Member of congress votes "no" on this. We could do better than this.