Political Quotes

“I think it really would add cost. We discussed earlier that the Affordable Health Care Act has a very powerful cost-saving mechanism called Staying Healthy. And that is the prevention programs. If you move that age from 65 to 67, you're going to have a significant population of seniors who will not have access to that preventative medicine program. It's not going to be there for them. So the potential for them to develop long-term, debilitating diseases increases. And when they get to Medicare, they will be much more expensive, to say nothing of what happens to them during that 2-year period when they can't get to Medicare. You said something earlier on and I'm going to go back to this. You talked about what happened before Medicare--the 50 percent of the population of seniors without medical insurance, the poverty rate. When you said that, my mind flashed back to when I was a young man in the 1950s--actually, not even a teenager--my dad took me to the county hospital. We were ranchers out in the boondocks of California, and nobody had insurance who was in their senior years. The county hospital sticks in my mind as the reason for Medicare. It was beyond horrible. There was just a row of beds, the most horrible odor in that ward-- people dying. It was so compelling. And today, there are issues out there. But we have seen the population of seniors healthy, living longer--20 years longer than they were just 45 years ago--50 years ago now. This is so important to seniors.…”