Social Security and Medicare

My grandfather didn’t have it easy – he moved from job to job throughout his life trying to make ends meet.  He was employed as a factory worker, a security guard, and even ran a convenience store in New Britain for a while.  When he retired, he had saved as much as he could, but he needed Social Security to survive.  And when my grandmother got really sick, it was Medicare that paid the bills and kept them out of bankruptcy.  My grandparents are simply representative of the millions of seniors who rely on Social Security to help pay bills, Medicare to keep them well, and Medicaid to help them if they run out of money to pay for their declining acute-care health needs.

That’s why I strongly oppose turning Social Security and Medicare over to the private sector.  Privitization would make lots of money for health insurers and investors, but leave seniors with a lot less than they have now.  But my head is not in the sand – as a young parent, I understand that these programs, unreformed, will not be around to take care of me and my children.  And every year we wait makes the changes we must pass harder and harder to swallow.  But reform must be done sensibly.  That’s why I am leading an effort in the Senate to pass strong Medicare delivery system reforms that will save hundreds of billions of dollars by changing the way we pay for health care from a system that now rewards volume to a system that must, in the future, reward quality and outcomes.  And fixing Social Security is easy, as it turns out.  We don’t need to ask beneficiaries to pick up the cost – we can simply adjust the cap on income that is taxable for Social Security so that we are once again, as we were two decades ago, taxing 90% of income in the U.S. to help replenish the trust fund.