AARP and Health Care Reform
AARP, a group of senior citizens consisting of over 40 million members has been directing a lot of negative energy, along with withdrawal from the recent health care reform plan in which President Obama has put into action during his presidency. Over a year ago, AARP had been pro health care, but due to their pro-reform stance along with plans for changing, the memberships have begun to dwindle with the loss of over 60,000 members in the months of July and August.
Kaiser Family foundation has conducted a poll in the month of August which concluded that in the age group of 65+, 23% felt as if the Medicare program would be much more sufficient as opposed to the newer reform scheme. Although there are several groups in opposition for reform, senior citizens have proven to gain the highest voter count and will place a high impact on swaying the changes for reform in the near future.
Under the Medicare Part D plan, in order for senior citizens to receive coverage’s, they must spend $4,350 of their own income, along with the cost of their prescription drugs needing to exceed the $2,700 threshold. Another positive note for senior citizens, if reform becomes enacted would be the White House deal, which would save drug manufactures over $80 billion dollars and aid citizens by lowering the cost of name-brand drugs 50%. Even with this good news, senior citizens are still skeptical on which side to take with touchy topics such as voluntary end-of-life counseling and whether or not the Democratic Party would be allocating funds to Americans who have absolutely no insurance coverage by taking away funding from Medicare. AARP’s representative, David Cerner has faith for the new health care reform, as long as they find ways to become more efficient with their cut-backs. He also noted that most senior citizens would be more comforted if they were aware of the types of cuts that were being made to Medicare. If the citizens were aware they would be less inclined to have fear and resentment to the changes being made.