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IN CONTRAST TO BUSH’S GIMMICK, KENNEDY PUTS FORTH REAL HEALTH CARE REFORM "MEDICARE FOR ALL" WILL SAVE BILLIONS AND GIVE ALL AMERICANS THE CARE THEY NEED


Washington, DC: Today, as President Bush focuses on health care in his State of the Union address after ignoring it for five years, Senator Kennedy will put forward real health care reform that would give quality affordable health care for all Americans. America’s health care system is the most economically inefficient in the industrial world. Kennedy’s plan would fix our fractured system of care, by extending Medicare to all Americans, from birth to the end of life, while allowing any American who wishes to stay in their current employer-sponsored plan to do so. Under Kennedy’s bill, employers can tailor their health plans to provide additional services to their employees that wrap around Medicare coverage. Tonight, as he attempted to do last year with his Social Security privatization fiasco, President Bush will try to make the American people believe that the solution to rising health costs is to shift more and more of those costs to ordinary Americans, or to deny care to those in need. Kennedy believes that’s the wrong prescription for health care. “America’s failure to guarantee the basic right to health care for all its citizens was one of the great public policy failures of the 20th century, and we must not allow that failure to continue in this new century,” Senator Kennedy said. “Like his Social Security privatization fiasco, President Bush’s health savings accounts are a gimmick that will only make a bad situation worse. Our goal should be an America where no citizen of any age fears the cost of health care, and no employer stops creating jobs because of the high cost of providing health insurance.” Below is a fact sheet on Senator Kennedy’s plan, as well as remarks upon introducing the legislation: