Medicare Reform

Abandons The Old And Ill

The following letter to US Representative Nancy Johnson has been received for publication.

Dear Representative Johnson:

In June we wrote to you separately concerning a flaw in the 2003 Medicare Reform bill which you, as the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee’s Health Care subcommittee, were largely responsible for drafting. Unfortunately, the response we received from your office cannot have come from you personally. It must only have been seen by a staff person who saw that it concerned Medicare and sent out a generic reply regarding that program. But that reply did not address our particular concern. Hence, this letter.

The law forbids the Center for Medicare and Medicaid from bargaining with drug companies for lower prices, as the Veterans Administration does for their clients. Because of this, our most vulnerable citizens, the old and the ill, must leave this country to obtain life-saving medications at affordable prices. This is because the Canadian government does for their citizens precisely what the law which you wrote prevents the American government from doing — bargaining with the pharmaceutical companies, buying in bulk, and obtaining lower prices. The result is the unseemly sight of busloads of elderly, sick Americans forced to go to a foreign country to purchase medications unaffordable at their local pharmacy. This, we believe, is wrong.

Surely if government has any function it is the defense rather than the abandonment of its most vulnerable citizens.

Will you pledge that, if reelected, you will work to have this provision eliminated? Please let us hear from you personally on this important matter.

Respectfully,

Michael Lucas

4 Philo Curtis Road, Sandy Hook                                 August 4, 2004