On July 30, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Medicare and Medicaid programs, designed to protect the health and well-being of millions of Americans.
With the current effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, many older Americans are fearful about how our national health care system will affect them. Millions of retirees did not solely rely on Medicare and possibly Medicaid as a safety net, but instead worked decades for employers that guaranteed retirement health care benefits in exchange for the labor we already provided them.
Unfortunately, many corporations have been walking away from their fiduciary commitments by dumping or diminishing their retirees’ earned health care benefits. Retirees need to know that these vital earned benefits are secure and cannot be taken away.
New proposed federal legislation, the Employee Benefits Protection Act (H.R. 2578), can help by making it more difficult for companies to reduce or simply eliminate the earned health care benefits of their former workers. Congress has the opportunity to protect seniors’ earned health care now, like they did 52 years ago, if they pass H.R. 2578 or implement it within any new health care law.
I urge fellow retirees to join with the nonprofit ProtectSeniors.org, which is fighting for these retiree protections in our nation’s capital.