On January 12th, Ted Kennedy gave a speech at the National Press Club. Below are some of his comments and ours.

Kennedy on having a mandate: “We, as Democrats, may be in the minority in Congress, but we speak for the majority of Americans. ”
Independent Sources: Not sure how he does his math. 3.4 million more Americans voted for the Republican ticket in the most recent election. Under most people’s definition, that would constitute a majority. The Dems also lost Congressional seats to Republicans. However, I guess there is no law that says that you can’t speak for people just because they vote against you.

Kennedy on Child Hunger: “Nearly a fifth of all children go to bed hungry at night, because their parents are working full time and still can’t make ends meet. ”
Independent Sources: We could not find any reputable studies from any sources to validate his numbers or come even close. It’s even a further stretch to say that all of this 20% are going hungry despite having two full-time working parents. No one likes the fact that we have under fed children in America but that doesn’t excuse grossly exaggerated claims. If he wants to attack an epidemic, he should take on obesity which is well documented especially in lower income environments. (Upon further review there is enough data refuting Senator Kennedy’s hungry children statement that it is deserving of its own post. Check back for that.)

Finally, Kennedy on Medicare: “Administrative costs are low, patient satisfaction is high, unlike with many private insurers, they can still choose their doctor and their hospital.”
Independent Sources: In response to his putting Medicare on a pedestal we’ve lifted the following from Amy Ridenour’s National Center Blog:

First, contrary to popular perception, Medicare isn’t an entitlement to health care for the elderly. Nothing in Medicare says that a beneficiary has a right to be seen by a doctor, or a right to receive an operation, drug or medical device. All Medicare does is entitle doctors and hospitals to get paid, at a rate that Medicare sets, if they provide services that Medicare deems “appropriate” to people covered by Medicare. In other words, Medicare is really an entitlement for the health care industry, albeit one with low prices, lots of rules, caveats and strings attached and literally over 100,000 pages of regulations. There is no guarantee any beneficiary will actually get a specific medical treatment under Medicare.

Second, Medicare already provides substandard care to the elderly, and the cost pressures that will result when the baby boomers retire and the size of the program almost doubles from 40 million to 70 million beneficiaries, virtually guarantee that the program’s standard of care will get worse — much worse — if nothing is done now to change its basic character. Medicare offers an outdated structure of benefits, cost sharing, and limitations and it delivers care in an episodic, fragmented, acute-care fashion rather than in an integrated, chronic-care model. While many assume that the elderly must be getting good care since Medicare is a fee-for-service system with generous funding, the evidence indicates Medicare is looking more and more like an urban public school system — ever more tax dollars go into the program, but the results keep declining.

Third, access to health services for the elderly under Medicare is decreasing and actually getting care will become harder and harder for future retirees. According to physician surveys conducted for the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, by 1999, 24 percent of doctors were refusing to take some, or even all, new Medicare patients, and in just the past three years that figure has increase to 30 percent. Another measure: it already takes Medicare up to four or five years to approve new treatments. In the meantime, beneficiaries have to either do without or pay out of their own pockets.

The only way to keep the rest of us from enduring a retirement characterized by waiting in pain for government rationed medical care is to transform Medicare from a bureaucratically administered entitlement for doctors and hospitals into a system driven by the needs and preferences of patients. The answer is to let the rest of us, when we retire, opt to take the value of our Medicare benefits as a subsidy to buy the kind of health care coverage we want — which might even include keeping the health insurance we have now.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 1st, 2005 at 11:40 pm by Insider and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.