Senator meets with seniors, blasts increase in premiums

By Chandra Broadwater
Staff writer

Eloise Jack’s sister used to pay $505 a month for medication with a $500 Social Security check.

Fortunately, Jack and her husband don’t have to worry about finding the delicate balance between paying for rising prescription drug costs to live and just plain living, she said. But most people they know do.

“All this messing around with Social Security and Medicare, we were all better off with it the way it was before,” Jack said.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller thinks so, too. He and several seniors met Sunday afternoon at Shoney’s restaurant in Dunbar. Over pie and coffee they talked about Medicare, Social Security and prescription drugs, before the senator headed to a Democratic rally at West Virginia State University.

Along with already rising Medicare premiums, Rockefeller said, the state’s seniors are going to get hit even harder with the recently announced 17 percent spike starting in January 2005.

The monthly premiums seniors pay for doctor visits and most other nonhospital expenses will go from $66.60 to $78.20, under the hike.

“That’s an extra $47 million for seniors in West Virginia,” Rockefeller said. The price will only get higher as the state’s population gets older, he said.

An estimated 347,000 people are Medicare beneficiaries in the state, he said, almost one-quarter of the state’s residents.

The Bush administration announced the largest increase in the agency’s 40-year history the day after the Republican National Convention and at the start of the Labor Day weekend as Hurricane Frances pounded the country’s eastern coast.

“After all the newspapers were put to bed, they released the 17.4 percent increase,” Rockefeller said. “I don’t approve that way of doing government business. If there’s bad news, tell people and face up to it.”

Rockefeller said he and others, including Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, hope to push legislation to stop the increase at 3 percent.

The extra money from the premium increase will only go toward seducing private insurance companies who don’t do business in the state anyway, he said.

“They don’t come here because they can’t make money off the older, sicker population,” he said. “So instead of a 2 percent cost, it will cost 10 [percent] to 20 percent overhead.”

Rockefeller also commented on the 41 different Medicare drug discount cards available to the state’s seniors. The cards are a temporary measure until prescription drug insurance under Medicare begins in 2006.

Though the Bush administration has said the cards may help Medicare clients save 10 percent to 25 percent off their drug costs, Rockefeller said that price is much lower.

“How do you deal with 41 different choices?” he asked. “How do you compare? And then how do you deal with bait-and-switch tactics?”

Some companies make a benefit available for a while and then stop, leaving people who have chosen a plan stuck with it for a year, Rockefeller said.

“They can stop or start at any time,” he said. “That’s not fair.”

As a solution, he said that Medicare should be kept the way it is, with a 2 percent overhead cost. Social Security should also stay the same at a 1 percent program cost.

“They’re the two most effective government programs we have,” Rockefeller said.

Sixty percent of state seniors rely totally on Social Security, he said. The average income of that 60 percent is $10,800 a year. People don’t need to worry about the possibility of not having anything later on down the road, he said.

Rolling back the tax cuts given to the wealthiest 1 percent of the population — just one-third of that population — would provide enough money to make Social Security solid for the next 75 years, he said.

The same thing applies to Medicare and prescription drug benefits, Rockefeller said. Money from a portion of the richest could go toward helping the poorest.

“It’s so infuriating; these are folks who don’t have to worry,” he said. “They don’t put their money back into the economy. It goes into a bank.”

To contact staff writer Chandra Broadwater, use e-mail or call 348-5194.