On the recordMay 26, 2010
That is absolutely correct. If the gentlelady will yield, I congratulate you for taking care of your health and getting those preventative measures taken care of. Even though we don't like to do them, they are good things to do. Those kind of copays, when you think about what seniors need to pay, with the more frequent medical testing perhaps, or higher costs of prescriptions, maybe taking more prescriptions, therefore more copays on those, the senior cost of living could be higher than the cost of living index for maybe the general population. That is why it is important that they have the economic security that Representative Richardson spoke of. For seniors, it is sort of like a three-legged stool. One leg of the stool is Social Security; one leg of the stool is personal savings, which we should all be thinking about as we get older; and one leg is also maybe a private pension. Yet this economic downturn has hurt that stool in all of those areas. With more people unemployed, fewer people are paying into the Social Security system, so that hurts the system as a whole. That is why it is so good that we are focused on jobs and working on jobs, to get more people doing what they want to do and need to do to support themselves, but also being part of the Social Security system.
