Paul Tonko: “Again, if you would suffer an interruption, when we talk about the beginning days of Medicare, the propensity to do…”

“Again, if you would suffer an interruption, when we talk about the beginning days of Medicare, the propensity to do something then would become the same cause today, because people were being impacted by cherry picking, by unaffordable rates, by inaccessible outcomes, where there was absolutely no desire to write a policy for some. And as we look at that age curve rise exponentially, I mean the life expectancy, I believe, in 1965 was 70 years of age. That has grown tremendously. And so now you are going to have more and more people living longer, and we need to help strengthen Medicare. But to end it at a time when people would go back to this rat race of trying to find someone to cover you, it puts the insurance company back in the driver's seat. Seniors would have precious little control over their destiny. And what I think can be documented clearly from that time in 1965, 1966 is that the economic vitality of senior households, that durability of their income status was held harmless with Medicare. And it used to dip south because health care costs would drain those retirement incomes in some format that would really impoverish our senior community. We're going to head back into the disaster of pre- 1965.”