Contact: Silver City Daily Press

Silver City, Dec 4, 2003 - U.S. Rep. Stevan Pearce, during a swing through the western part of his district, made a stop in Silver City.

He said two topics he has focused on and answered questions about are Iraq and the Medicare bill.

"During a trip to Iraq that I recently made, the troops everywhere in the country told me to tell the president that they loved him," Pearce told the Daily Press. "I can't imagine how thrilled they were with the president's Thanksgiving day visit."

He showed a video about his trip to students at Silver High School yesterday.

"Everyone has asked about Iraq, but they focus even more with in-depth questions about Medicare," he said.

The only way to keep Medicare available for years to come was to reform it, according to Pearce.

"I feel this (bill) was a very balanced, reasoned response to problems," Pearce said. "Citizens will have a choice in Medicare coverage and several demo projects are going on across the country. We're not going to socialize medicine; we're not going to kill Medicare; we're going to make it survive for future generations."

A prescription drug benefit and a health savings account are major parts of the bill.
"The HSA at any age will be tax-free money going in and going out," he said. "It can even become part of a person's estate."

Border issues became part of a heated exchange right before the bill came out of conference, according to Pearce. He told the committee that the millions of dollars spent by hospitals on illegal aliens along the border with Mexico impacted "my hospitals in my district."

He discussed reimbursement rates for Medicare in rural hospitals as compared with urban area hospitals.

"The urban areas have always gotten preferential rates, but this bill equalizes the rates for hospitals in rural areas," Pearce said. "We didn't quite achieve complete parity for doctors in rural areas, but we came closer to it. This is huge for rural areas and will benefit New Mexico."
For the first time, Medicare added a high income-related threshhold to qualify for the program.
The prescription drug benefit presents two plans. Up to $2,200 will come out of the pockets of lower-income participants. With an income greater than 150 percent of the poverty rate, the amount rises
to $3,600. Above expenses of $3,600 everyone gets more coverage.

"For the first time, Medicare has a preventitive component," Pearce said. "We have to make better health decisions, but we can do early screening for high cholesterol and, among others, for breast and prostate cancer, which were previously disallowed by Medicare."

Pearce said he feels people must "rethink the way we do medicine in the United States, but this is the first step to reforming medicine in the country."

He reported drug companies "had their ears pinned back a bit. Patents have been misused. The companies would rewrite the patents right before expiration and make the drug usable for a different group of people. Now they can only extend those patents once."

Incentives will be given for the use of generic instead of brand-name drugs. Savings across the board will be realized because "prescription drugs are now doing things that only surgery used to be able to do and drugs are much cheaper than surgery," he said.

He explained that money for expanded Medicare coverage was already built into deficit projections.
"Our economy is now more like it was before the dot-com bubble when everyone projected surpluses for years to come," Pearce said. "We're already seeing growth in the job rate. The economy is again growing."

Within four to five years, according to Pearce, Medicare was projected to be 45 percent of the budget.

"With landmark changes coming as baby boomers retire, we had to reform Medicare or accept it as broken," he said. "Right now, Medicare is 35-38 percent of the budget and the boomers haven't retired yet."