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Medicare: We need to preserve and protect this program for future generations while ensuring we maintain benefits for current retirees. Medicare is facing significant challenges: over 10,000 baby boomers retire every day, putting incredible strain on a program that has fewer and fewer workers paying into it, coupled with the $500 billion in cuts to Medicare included in the 2010 health care law. One in three primary care doctors are forced to limit how many Medicare patients they see. And health care costs are skyrocketing, at nearly four times the rate of normal inflation.
The Congressional Budget Office and the Medicare Trustees, both independent, nonpartisan groups, have forecasted that Medicare will be bankrupt within nine to 18 years, respectively. We must take action now; doing nothing and hoping for a miracle is not and cannot be a solution.
While this debate over Medicare is multifaceted, any change being discussed must not impact seniors who are currently receiving Medicare coverage now or in the near future - there will be NO change in benefits for those age 55 or older. We must deliver the benefits that today's seniors have been promised and have already supported with their hard-earned tax dollars, and we must preserve the program for the future. I will continue to fight against any proposal that will reduce benefits for those age 55 and older.
I will continue to carefully evaluate any proposal that affects these benefits and will only support ideas that deliver on the promises we made to all seniors, does not raid the Medicare system to pay for other health care programs, and will help reduce costs while still ensuring access to the doctor that you want. We can make Medicare stronger now and for the future, and we can do it in a bipartisan way.
Social Security: I agree that Americans should be able to count on a safe and secure retirement and that Social Security is a vital part of that. The Social Security program was created during the height of the Great Depression in order to provide assistance to seniors in financially dire situations. Today, however, with only three workers paying into the system for every retiree (as compared to 159 workers for every retiree in 1940), it's impractical to assume that the program will be able to operate without addressing the fiscal challenges threatening its future.
As the debate over Social Security preservation continues, it is important that we strike a common-sense balance that ensures we deliver on our promise to seniors as well as strengthen the long-term viability of the program for future generations.
For a complete list of the bills I am sponsoring and cosponsoring, please click here.
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