Health Care Reform Call to Action

Asclepios Your Weekly Medicare Consumer Advocacy Update - Medicare Rights Center - November 13, 2008 • Volume 8, Issue 46

The Call to Action on health reform issued this week by Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the Finance Committee, provides new hope to people with disabilities struggling to survive until their Medicare coverage begins. Senator Baucus’s proposal to cover the uninsured and reform our health care system includes a phase-out of the 24-month period that people with disabilities must endure between getting their first Social Security disability check and the beginning of their Medicare coverage. Some 400,000 people are without any health coverage during this two-year waiting period and many more go broke paying premiums and copayments as they cope with a disabling disease or injury that prevents them from working.

The phase-out approach is consistent with legislation offered by Senator Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico, and Representative Gene Green, Democrat of Texas. The cost of eliminating the waiting period makes it difficult for lawmakers to push for immediate elimination.

Baucus’s plan also provides some immediate help for many people in the waiting period, including those least able to afford health care while they wait for Medicare coverage to begin.

The plan would expand Medicaid to cover everyone living in poverty (annual income of less than $10,400 for an individual). Over one-third of people in the waiting period with incomes below the poverty level have no health insurance.

Baucus would also allow individuals age 55 to 64, an age group that covers a high proportion of people in the waiting period, to buy Medicare coverage with their own money. This should help many people who now cannot get coverage in the private market, but, as with COBRA coverage from a former employer, the premiums will be unaffordable to many people with limited incomes. For many, affordable health care coverage will come only when the Medicare waiting period is phased out or when a universal coverage plan, including subsidies for people of modest means, is implemented. Baucus’s plan, by coupling a phase-out of the waiting period with a universal coverage plan, charts a path to improving health coverage for people with disabilities.