Paul Tonko: “Representative Garamendi, earlier you had talked about the impact on the 55-year-old or 54-year-old. If you look at a…”

“Representative Garamendi, earlier you had talked about the impact on the 55-year-old or 54-year-old. If you look at a 54-year-old today, that individual is advised to save some $182,000 to $190,000 so as to have that available cash to cover the deficiency that's going to come with this end to Medicare, where you shop with this voucher, and it's only going to cover 32 cents on the dollar. So that 54-year-old is already impacted, but there is more to the picture than that. When you draw the line in the sand and say, ``look, we end Medicare, and so those under 55 today will have to fend for themselves,'' they'll shop out in the private sector market, but when you don't have the newly entering senior community as they turn 65 enter into the mix, there is a correlation of age with the drawdown of the health care system. As you take the younger senior population, they provide for that ebb and flow within the pooling that Representative Courtney talked about earlier. The beauty of the program is that you pool seniors from the very youngest of seniors to ``senior'' seniors, and as that need for health care grows with age, the newly entering help provide that balance. So the stability of the program and the durability of that program is at risk, I believe, because we're changing the dynamics.…”