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Elderly
weary of Medicare vows. A key voting bloc demands details By
Patrick Healy, the Here
were her calculations: $317 plus $255 in Social Security checks equals
$572 to support herself per month, or $6,864 a year. Then she began
subtracting: $79 per month to repay a bank loan, $146 for rent, $28 for
phone service, $15 for J.C. Penney ("I owe them a lot"), $33 for
medicines, $100 for food, and $33 for her monthly hairdo. "Leaves
me $138 to live on, and that's if my heart troubles or diabetes don't act
up," Kirk said after Kerry's speech Tuesday in this small city in
northwestern To
her and many other elderly Iowans, who make up a powerful voting bloc in
the first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses in January, the leading
Democrats like Kerry and Dean have so far been speaking in abstractions:
Save Medicare. Preserve Social Security. Create a prescription drug
benefit for the elderly. Their
attacks on each other -- especially Kerry's and Representative Richard A.
Gephardt's salvos that Dean supported deep cuts in Medicare in 1995 -- are
less persuasive, or relevant, than the day-to-day, dollars-and-cents
anxieties that keep many at the Siouxland Senior Center awake at night. As
the nine Democratic presidential contenders gather in Phoenix this evening
for their next televised debate, Kerry and Gephardt are seeking ways to
pull ahead of Dean in polls in Iowa and nationally. Those three, along
with most of the other candidates, have hit on Medicare's future in
particular as a rallying point to help lock up a share of the 15 percent
of These
Iowans tend to vote in disproportionately high numbers, according to the
Iowa AARP, and could prove decisive in a tight caucus race next year. "About
80 percent of my patients are on Medicare, and believe me, they are going
to be voting next year," said Diane Marshall, a respiratory therapist
at Immanuel Medical Center in Omaha who attended a Kerry speech on health
care Monday at a senior citizens center in Council Bluffs, Iowa. A Kerry
supporter herself, she added, "I think seniors are going to look hard
at each of the candidates. They want specifics about what these men would
do for them." Some
elderly Iowans say they are bewildered by recent criticisms by Kerry and
Gephardt of Dean's comments, in 1995, praising a congressional Republican
proposal to cut the growth of Medicare spending by $270 billion. Dean says
he was supporting cost containment measures that President Clinton
ultimately adopted, although "I
feel like my throat is being cut today with all the trouble I have paying
for drugs," said Marilyn Gorn, a 69-year-old from Of
"The
political muscle of seniors here is just huge," said Scott McIntyre,
a spokesman for the Iowa Hospital Association. "You don't talk about
health care in About
450,000 Iowans, or roughly 16 percent of the population, are Medicare
beneficiaries, according to the association; only Campaigning
in Iowa this week, Kerry proposed a new "compact with the greatest
generation," promising to crack down on drug companies to lower the
prices of medication by "cutting the greed out of the system,"
such as million-dollar salaries for company executives and legal loopholes
that slow the sale of lower-cost generic drugs. Both
Gephardt and Dean have also campaigned hard on health care, with Gephardt
promising a huge expansion of health care insurance to approach universal
coverage, and Dean, a doctor, introducing plans to improve long-term care
for the elderly and restating his support for Medicare. Pat
Lawson, a 50-year-old on state disability and Medicare for a number of
medical problems, especially migraines, was eating a grilled cheese
sandwich at the "I
think seniors are fed up. We've been hearing about a new prescription drug
benefit since the
Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging |
