John Edwards for President-A Message to Older Americans

A Message to Older Americans

Health Care and Prescription Drugs

John Edwards will take on the insurance and drug companies with a plan for true universal health care that:

Requires by law that every American have comprehensive health coverage, including mental health coverage.
Requires businesses to either cover their employees or help pay their premiums.
Makes insurance affordable by creating new tax credits, expanding Medicaid and SCHIP, reforming insurance laws, and containing costs.
Creates new "Health Care Markets" to give families and businesses purchasing power and choices, including one public plan. The system could evolve into a single-payer plan if Americans choose public insurance.
Strengthens Medicare by negotiating costs with drug maker, permits safe reimportation of affordable medicine from Canada, and stops misleading drug advertising.

Preventive Care and Wellness

Health Care Markets will offer primary and preventive services at little or no cost. They will encourage individuals to schedule free physicals and enroll in healthy living programs with lower premiums.

Obesity is now epidemic in the United States. Edwards will support healthy communities with safe streets, walking and biking trails, safe and well-equipped parks, and physical education for children.

Health Care Markets will encourage plans to monitor patients' health to keep them out of the emergency room. For example, plans may counsel diabetic patients on healthy choices and how to control their blood sugar levels.

Long-Term Care

Our long-term care system is poorly equipped to give independence to older Americans and forces many families to juggle elder care, child care, and their jobs or spend themselves into poverty to pay for nursing homes. Edwards will reform Medicaid and Medicare to let people to choose home-based care in their communities and test innovations such as asset and income protection programs. He will also support states and communities offering much-needed and often less expensive alternatives – like adult day care and senior villages – that allow seniors to live at home with their loved ones.

Social Security

Edwards is committed to protecting Social Security. He has strongly opposed President Bush's efforts to privatize it, which would cut guaranteed benefits and risked individuals' retirements in the stock market. The financing of Social Security can only be solved by a package of reforms that has the support of both Democrats and Republicans. Edwards supports a successor to the Greenspan commission appointed in 1981, dedicated to finding a solution that is non-ideological, strongly bipartisan, and committed to the goals of ensuring every American can retire with dignity and extending the life of the Trust Fund. One option is an additional tax on workers with very high incomes.

Retirement Security

Every American is entitled to retire with dignity. Edwards will require employers to offer all workers without another pension access to a new universal retirement account, letting them build up savings no matter how many times they change jobs. The government will match worker contributions up to dollar-for-dollar on the first $500 with a new tax credit. Edwards will also pass legislation to strengthen pension protections when companies go into bankruptcy.

To protect the freedom to work, Edwards supports vigorous enforcement and strengthening of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and the ADA to protect Congress' original intent. He will also protect older workers from misleading "retirement incentives" that push them out of their jobs.

Financial Literacy

Edwards will also subsidize banks to offer free savings accounts to the nearly 28 million Americans without them, giving them a way to save and avoid exorbitant check-cashing fees and support teaching financial literacy. He will create "Work Bonds" to help low-income workers get started on savings accounts. He will also establish strong new rules against predatory and abusive lending, including a new Family Savings and Debt Commission to regulate credit products.