Medicare Bill Passes Through Senate
By: Import User
Updated: July 11, 2008
A change to the Medicare bill will improve health care for seniors, rural Americans and military families. The bill will also lower premiums for Medicare users.
"The most important thing is it would maintain the ability of 44 million people on Medicare to have access to their doctors in a way that doesn't unfairly increase their premiums from Medicare," said Jim Dau from AARP.
The bill will cut 12 billion dollars from private plans under Medicare Advantage. Medicare expert, Ron Pollack said the 34 thousand people in Lubbock on Medicare and the 3,000 using private plans will hardly be affected.
"They'll be getting higher value of care and the tax payers wont be paying quite as much," said Pollack.
On Tuesday, Senator John Cornyn told KAMC he was for scrapping the current Medicare system and implementing a long-term reform. However, on Wednesday, Senator Cornyn voted in favor of the temporary fix because a long-term solution wasn't available. Cornyn said he would continue to push for a permanent change to the Medicare problem.
