The House Ways & Means Subcommittee on Health held a hearing entitled “Preserving and Strengthening Medicare.”  Unfortunately, as the ranking member Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) made clear, this hearing actually had virtually nothing to do with preserving and strengthening Medicare:

“This is the first Health Subcommittee hearing of the year, and it could have been an opportunity to have a fresh, constructive conversation about Medicare. Unfortunately, this won’t be the case. It looks like we should expect more of the same from my Republican colleagues this morning – bad ideas repeated incessantly in the hope that the American people eventually fall for them.

The core proposal that my Republican colleagues have offered – to end Medicare as we know it – will have devastating effects on seniors. It will shift costs onto beneficiaries, create more losers than winners, and lead to a death spiral in traditional Medicare.

We all know this.”

NCPSSM President/CEO, Max Richtman, submitted testimony to the Committee and reacted to the day’s proceedings:

“Unfortunately, today’s Congressional hearing on ‘Preserving and Strengthening Medicare’ offered no new ideas and was instead an Orwellian political exercise in which politicians say preserve when they actually mean privatize, and strengthen when they mean slash. 

Republicans in the House envision a future in which millions of seniors will lose their guaranteed Medicare benefits in favor of a privatized CouponCare system in which they receive a government coupon to try and buy private insurance. Millions of seniors in Medicaid will lose their benefits due to block-granting to states without providing the resources to pay for it.  The repeal of the Affordable Care Act will leave tens of millions without insurance and strip benefits from seniors in Medicare.  

The Republican leadership has offered no plans to improve benefits in Medicare or make reforms to reign in the skyrocketing price of drugs and healthcare costs system wide.  Instead, the GOP vision for seniors in Medicare is they must just do more with less. Stagnant wages are grinding away at the middle class’s ability to save for retirement.  Many employers have significantly scaled back or eliminated the traditional retirement benefits offered to their employees.  As a result, current and future retirees simply cannot afford proposals to cut benefits, raise the eligibility age or privatize the program.”…Max Richtman, NCPSSM President/CEO

While the House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee promoted destroying traditional Medicare in favor of a fully privatized system during today’s Congressional hearing, their GOP colleagues are moving a budget through Congress that would make that plan reality.

The House budget would cut Social Security and Medicare by $463 billion over 10 years, while cutting Medicaid and other health programs by $1.028 trillion, not including the Affordable Care Act.  The GOP budget protects the wealthiest Americans and big corporations from any tax increases while imposing massive spending cuts on average Americans and their families.

Max Richtman’s full testimony as submitted to the House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee is here.