Senior Citizens Deserve Comfortable Quality Of Life In Golden Years
June 17, 2005, Retirement is supposed to be a time when people get to relax and do the things they didn’t have the time to do when they were working and raising a family. But today’s economic realities have senior citizens scrambling to make ends meet.
Energy costs are up, the nation is experiencing record deficits, and health-care costs are going through the roof. Middle Tennesseans on fixed incomes are being bombarded from all sides it seems. The White House even wants to monkey around with the one thing that’s guaranteed in a person’s retirement: a Social Security check.
Raiding money from the Social Security program to put into a volatile stock market is risky, and risk is not supposed to be part of Social Security. A sound retirement plan may include a certain amount of risk in investment vehicles like mutual funds or stocks, but most financial advisors will tell you that you should put some of your nest egg in the safest place possible. Social Security was not meant to be the only part of someone’s retirement security, just the safest part of it.
I’m all for making Social Security better and solvent for years to come. And I support new savings incentives to add-on accounts created outside the current Social Security system. But I do not want to see what is supposed to be a safe investment turned over to a risky stock market venture. In addition, I don’t want to see the enormous costs associated with this transition added to our nation’s already record deficits.
Medicare is another program meant to help seniors in their golden years. It, too, has been modified in a way that may exclude many seniors and also increase our nation’s record deficits. In 2003, Congress unfortunately passed a new Medicare drug law, which is supposed to help seniors purchase their prescription drugs. Previously the Medicare program had excluded prescription drugs, which, for seniors, can be the costliest part of their health care.
But the new law was set up in a way that contains large gaps in coverage for many seniors. The law also prohibits the government from negotiating lower prices for the drugs bought through the Medicare provision despite the government’s ability to negotiate lower prices for similar drugs dispensed by the Department of Veterans Affairs. And it may speed up Corporate America’s trend to dump retiree drug-benefit plans as prescription-drug costs continue to rise, piling on, once again, to our nation’s record deficits.
Common sense is often hard to find in Washington. Congress could easily help senior citizens and others with the skyrocketing costs of prescription drugs by allowing them to reimport safely expensive drugs. Senior citizens on Medicare and people without prescription drug coverage – generally the most vulnerable segments of our society – have to pay exorbitant prices for their medicines.
Allowing pharmacists and wholesalers to import lower-priced prescription drugs from other countries could reduce the cost of some medicines, as long as the drugs are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and safeguards are kept in place. We can find ways to lessen the cost of prescription drugs.
