FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Vicki Robb, 703-329-3356 vrobb@retiresafe.org
 

Citing a BAD Bill and a BAD Process, RetireSafe Urges Calls to Congress to Stop the Health CARE Reform Bill

Washington, DC (March 19, 2010) Today RetireSafe, representing 400,000 senior citizen supporters nationwide, urged every older American to make their voice heard in opposition to the health care reform bill soon to be voted on in the House. RetireSafe President Thair Phillips urged seniors to tell their Representative "that they are watching every vote, and to remind them that you will be voting in November!"

Phillips said, "Today, we find ourselves at a place with health care reform that no one could have imagined a year ago. The road to where we are today has been a series of bad ideas, followed by a partisan sleight-of-hand legislative process. If someone, a year ago, had described the current bill that is on the cusp of being passed, and had explained the process that was to be used to pass it -- I think any sane person would have said, "That's ludicrous; the American people would never allow this to happen." He continued, "You would have thought that there would be such outrage that no politician in their right mind would vote for it." "Yet here we are, close to having a bill signed into law that will have a devastating impact on Medicare, burden us and our children for decades with an enormous mill stone of debt, and steal away basic freedoms that may never be restored," he added.

Phillips noted that the bill contains:

• Almost $500 billion in cuts to Medicare.

• The establishment of a presidentially appointed board to tell doctors how they must practice medicine.

• A restriction on building or completing new high-quality physician-owned hospitals, or expanding existing ones.

• The "cornhusker kickback", the "Louisiana purchase" and over 10 other special deals.

• A mandate that everyone must purchase health insurance, a mandate that appears to violate the Constitution and which is sure to be challenged in court.

• The use of accounting "trickery" (such as assuming the broad 21 percent cut in doctor payments paid by Medicare will actually take place) that hides the trillion plus dollars of debt the country will be saddled with over the next 20 years and beyond.