Hands Off Our Medicare!

At a time when this nation faces the deepest recession in decades, skyrocketing unemployment, and fiscal crisis in our states, towns, and families, the nation’s safety net is threatened by a select group whose overwhelming majority have historically favoured cutting benefits or privatizing federal social programs in order to balance the budget and enriching the corporate sector.

Despite widespread public support, the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, or the Deficit Commission, refuses to consider common sense solutions such as cutting the military budget, taxing the rich, negotiating prescription drug costs, and eliminating the waste of the private health insurance industry.

As the Deficit Commission prepares to make recommendations to Congress, it’s critical to remember:

• Raising eligibility ages for Social Security is an across the board cut of the benefits that we pay into for our entire lives. Raising the full benefits age by three years is a cut of 20%.
• Cutting benefits to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are unnecessary when more reasonable cost controls can be considered such as the hundreds of billions in savings from implementing a single-payer health care system.
• Sending any portion of these federal social insurance programs to Wall Street which are intended to publicly accountable for every cent is unconscionable.
• The Deficit Commission is expected to make a recommendation to the House of Representatives for a vote in December. That means that the cuts and privatization of our most effective social insurance programs could be passed during a lame duck period of Congress.

It’s not the first time our social insurance programs have been attacked, and it won’t be the last, but Healthcare-NOW! believes we must protect what we have so that we can expand and improve Medicare for everyone.

We need you to join us at the front lines of this battle. We need an improved Medicare for All system that will control health care costs, deliver high quality, guaranteed health care to each of us, and get our economy back on track. Now is the time to stand up to those who will sacrifice these important programs and say “Hands OFF our Medicare and Social Security!”

You can find out more at the new website – www.HandsOffOurMedicare.org.

Sign up to get updates on the Deficit Commission. Call and write your Representatives. Get your Representative and Federal Candidates to take the Pledge (.pdf) to protect Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Join actions across the country on July 30th celebrating 45 years of our successfully providing care to those over 65 and with disabilities.

These Wall Street insiders have to wake up to the needs of the people. We can’t be silent on protecting these critical programs and continuing to fight for the health care system this nation still desperately needs.