Yesterday, I posted in Blue Ohio about an ad U.S. Chamber of Commerce ran for Steve Chabot, congressional candidate from Cincinnati. The ad credited Chabot with voting for the Medicare changes that took effect the first of the year. The ad was pulled off because Chabot actually voted against the bill.
The same ad is running for Mike DeWine. The ad talks about how “great” the new Medicare program is and to urge votes for DeWine for supporting this bill. Check it out:
Today’s Washington Post shows us that the new Medicare program is still hurting millions of seniors around this country:
The calls are starting to come in from shocked or angry seniors. They have just learned that their Medicare drug plans are maxing out on early coverage and that they must now spend $2,850 from their own pockets before coverage will resume.
“I can’t pay for my medications,” one man told Howard Houghton of the Fairfax Area Agency on Aging the other day. “What do I do?”
Over the next five months, several million Americans with high medicine costs could find themselves in a similar bind. The gap in insurance, popularly called the doughnut hole, is an unusual provision in most of the private plans offered in Medicare’s new Part D prescription drug program. Advocates for the elderly say it is misunderstood and problematic.
“There’s nothing sweet about the doughnut hole,” said Deene Beebe, spokeswoman for the New York-based Medicare Rights Center.
The program was designed to give all participants a certain level of insurance and to protect elderly and disabled recipients with chronic or catastrophic illnesses from huge prescription expenses. To afford those two goals, Part D’s designers built in an annual period during which individuals have to pay for medicines themselves.
This Medicare program has been an utter nightmare since it’s implementation the first of the year. Throughout January and February, numerous states had to declare health emergencies and actually fund prescriptions for seniors themselves. In our own district, John Boehner’s office flat out refused to address the situation to area seniors. His office would not even talk to people about the life threatening problems they were facing until he got some competition in the campaign trail.
The Republicans are so far out of touch with the American people, it is sickening. They are taunting this program as some sort of major success, yet you ask seniors, who have been affected by it and health care professionals, who have had to deal with the nightmares, and they will tell you it was nothing but a massive cluster. While the Republicans want to debate such things as gay marriage and flag burning, we have citizens in this country who can not get the medicine they need to live. Let me repeat that – The Republicans have put their ideological agenda ahead of the lives of this countries own citizens. That is definatley something that isn’t “Christian” and sure as hell isn’t what America is about.
I am glad to see this ad. I hope the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is running it in every part of the country. Remind the seniors, who are the largest percentage of voters in mid-term elections, what the Republicans have done to them. The Republicans have proved they would rather stop a gay couple from getting married then to save the life of a senior citizen. That is the cold hard facts and it is time for them to pay for their sick ways. We have a chance to make them pay this November and we must!