Posted on 06/28/2002 11:21:02 AM PDT by kattracks
One step closer to Socialism. This AARP is nothing more than a greedy SOB! Demanding that everyone else is forced to pay for his health care. So what if some old lady picks up aluminum cans to pay for her medicine- I have to work to pay for my food and rent- and unlike her, pay taxes on it.
If we're going to be stuck with the bills for seniors' surgery anyway, buying them prescription drugs actually makes economic sense. Many surgical/medical procedures that seniors are prone to—such as heart surgery and dialysis—can be avoided or at least delayed using drugs, saving thousands of dollars. The current systeml, however, provides a perverse economic incentive to seniors to choose the expensive surgical option over the economical drug option, since the surgery costs them less out of pocket than the drugs. And the cost of surgery isn't going to drop, whereas the range of affordable drug therapies that obviate surgery will continue to grow.
If you want to abolish Medicare altogether, I'm with you all the way—although there's exactly zero chance of that happening as long as people 50+ years old are permitted to vote. But short of that, providing a prescription drug benefit is probably in our economic best interests in the long term. Given that, it makes more sense to score points for supporting a tolerable bill now, earning political capital that we can use later, rather than fighting tooth-and-nail against something that is both inevitable and sensible.
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