This time of year, many seniors in our area have questions about Medicare, as Medicare Open Enrollment is from now until December 7. That’s why my office stands ready to assist any constituents who may have questions about the Medicare Open Enrollment period or are experiencing issues with receiving benefits. For more information about services available to seniors in Ohio’s Eighth Congressional District, please call (513) 779-5400 or visit our “Services for Seniors” webpage at boehner.house.gov.
Perhaps one of the most commonly-asked questions I hear is: “Will Medicare be available for me and my children?”
Today, Medicare and Social Security are still scheduled to go bankrupt and the national debt stands at $17.8 trillion, an increase of $7.2 trillion under President Obama – who has yet to propose a credible plan to balance the budget, despite admitting in 2011 that “all this rising debt will cost us jobs and damage our economy.”
To address this, my colleagues and I in the House have passed a balanced budget that protects and strengthens Medicare for current and future generations. Meanwhile, President Obama now actually denies there is a problem, going so far as to brag about cutting the annual budget deficit – which is still bigger than any year before he took office. It amazes me when I hear the president bragging about cutting the deficit, especially considering that he has opposed and denounced nearly every responsible attempt to address the drivers of the government’s exploding debt: autopilot spending on programs such as Medicare and Social Security.
As I’ve long said, solving our spending problem is the key step we must take in order to have any shot at saving Medicare and Social Security. Our spending problem is bad for our economy, and it’s stealing from our kids and our grandkids – robbing them of benefits they’ll never see and leaving them with burdens that are nearly impossible to repay. Earlier this year, we passed three pro-growth budget reform bills and a balanced budget that would help save programs like Medicare, stop spending money our country doesn’t have, root out waste, and begin to pay down our debt. And we’re not backing down – I’ve made this one of our top priorities in the People’s House.
While President Obama may be fine with the current status quo, I refuse to accept it. My five points for resetting America’s economic foundation includes saving programs like Medicare and Social Security from bankruptcy – not denying the problem. These programs are crucial to thousands of Ohioans and tens of millions of Americans, and they need to be fixed and put on a sustainable path.
As I continue my work to protect and strengthen Medicare, I want to hear from you. Please visit boehner.house.gov to send me an e-mail or call (513) 779-5400 or (937) 339-1524 to share your thoughts on this or any other issue you may be facing. I look forward to hearing from you.
“Will Medicare be available for me and my children?” the answer is simply: yes for you and no for your children. By the time our children are through with the current Medicare patients and those “cropping up” during their active professional lifetime, i.e. over, say, the next thirty years, demograhics will have changed so much that due to longevity one the one hand and the lower birth rate on the other pus shrinking well-paid job opportunities there will likely be more Medicare recipients than paying staff in the economy at large. Plus, these payers will likely be hampered by still paying back their student debt until their own retirement (whence their parents could still hope to pay back their mortgage and be left with a paid-off house at that same stage in their lives). So it is unlikely they will have set aside much money for their own future care nor will they have the children to look after them and/or fund the public spending on e.g. Medicare. This is a death spiral and so far, seven years into the crisis dating from, say, 2007/08, no real change has been forthcoming.