February 19, 1973
Page 4376
ANNOUNCEMENT OF HEARINGS: "BARRIERS TO HEALTH CARE FOR OLDER AMERICANS"
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, as chairman of the Subcommittee on Health of the Elderly of the Senate Special Committee on Aging, I wish to announce that the subcommittee will soon begin hearings on "Barriers to Health Care for Older Americans."
The first round of hearings – on March 5, 6, and 7 – will provide us with essential information for our overall study. They will sound the themes to be explored at some length at later hearings here and possibly in the field, or in special reports issued in conjunction with the hearings.
But the March hearings will also serve a more immediate purpose. They will provide an opportunity to take testimony on the administration proposal to raise the cost of coinsurance and deductibles for participants in the medicare program.
My own feeling, from the limited information now available, is that this so-called cost sharing could become very costly by deterring those in need of care from receiving it early enough in their illness to prevent institutionalization or prolonged treatment.
Indeed, studies have shown that deductibles and coinsurance have little effect in preventing overutilization and that they are, in fact, administrative nuisances.
I will look forward to an early discussion of the administration proposals and the relationship of those proposals to other issues which the subcommittee shall investigate–
How rising medical costs are undermining medicare and medicaid, causing new restrictions and higher costs to participants.
How alternatives to institutionalization are not available to most older persons, despite official lip service to that principle.
How fragmentation of medical services is worsening especially in inner city and rural areas.
How health care costs keep going up for the elderly, despite the essential protection provided by medicare.
My subcommittee study will be held in conjunction with a committee inquiry into "Future Directions in Social Security." As I said at the committee hearing on January 22:
The valuable testimony on health care will result from this first round of hearings in this series will serve as the springboard of hearings and other inquiries by my Subcommittee on Health of the Elderly in 1973.
A major goal of these hearings and other Subcommittee activities will be to make certain that a national health security program for all – when finally enacted into law – will include provisions meeting the real needs of older persons.
Yet another goal will be to stop the decline of health services for older Americans that has marked this Administration's approach to Medicare and Medicaid and other health programs that serve the elderly. We will be focusing on the barriers to adequate health care for the elderly and ways to remove them.
The hearings will be held at 10 a.m. March 5, 9:45 a.m. March 6, and 10 a.m. March 7 in room 6226, Dirksen Office Building.