Health4all : Pretty Exciting: The Alliance to Restore Medicare

Health4all

Every year more Alaskan families lose health insurance and can't afford health care. Every year more families with health insurance cannot afford to use it because of expensive out-of-pocket charges. Every year more Alaskan elders with Medicare are refused treatment by local physicians. And every year health care in Alaska continues to cost 30 percent more than down south. These problems are a reflection of the crisis across the nation. Not surprisingly, the United States ranks last in preventable deaths compared to 14 Western European nations. We have a lot to talk about.

Lawrence D. Weiss retired from UAA in 2004 as a research professor in public health. He designed and built the Master of Public Health program at UAA, and has published three books and numerous articles on public health and health policy issues. He completed a post-doctoral degree at Harvard School of Public Health in 1982, and has been in Alaska ever since. His favorite expression is "facts matter." Occasionally he can be found in a local pub drinking beer and eating pizza while engaged in passionate conversation with friends.

Pretty Exciting: The Alliance to Restore Medicare

Posted by health4all

Posted: December 18, 2008 - 3:12 pm

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A Call for Action from the Alliance to Restore Medicare:

To Restore and Ensure Medicare's Health

Background

Medicare, the federal social insurance program guaranteeing health care to older people and people with serious disabilities, has been treasured for decades by most Americans. But a law enacted five years ago is now undermining it. A multi-prong assault on Medicare is under way. It must be halted and reversed.

Developed with stealth and marketed deceptively, the so-called "Medicare Modernization Act" of 2003 (MMA) is looting Medicare's trust funds and undermining the public's confidence in Medicare as it chips away at this efficient, publicly accountable program, aiming to atomize it by gradually moving its beneficiaries into the profit oriented private insurance market.

The 1965 creation of the Medicare program was one of the most far-reaching and successful initiatives of the vision of a Great Society. By providing health care coverage to older Americans through a government-based program, the United States advanced the nation's aspiration to end poverty and promote equality. The Medicare program currently provides 43 million older adults and people with disabilities access to care and security from the costs of serious illness.

Since Medicare's creation, its foes have searched for ways to make it more profitable for private health insurance companies, even though it might thus become less secure for the people it covers. These companies see Medicare as a highly lucrative financial opportunity, not as the bedrock of reliable coverage for older Americans and people with disabilities. Actions that would undermine its social insurance principles have often been masked by the pretense of saving it.

Five years ago, these opponents of public health insurance figured out how they could ruin traditional Medicare over the course of a few years. They succeeded in turning their scheme into law in 2003 when Congress passed, and the President signed, the MMA.

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