House Member Markey Admits
Medicare will take hit
Some people, including Medicare
recipients, will have to give up some current benefits to truly reform the
nation's health-care system, Rep. Betsy Markey told a
gathering of constituents in
Markey has repeatedly said during the
August congressional recess that Medicare spending needs to be reined in to
help pay for reforming the broader health-care system.
"There's going to be some people
who are going to have to give up some things, honestly, for all of this to
work," Markey said at a Congress on Your Corner event at CSU. "But we
have to do this because we're Americans."
About 275 people att-ended
Wednesday's meetings, split into two groups. About 1,300 people have attended
Markey's health-care meetings over the past eight days, and another 10,300
10,300 participated in a telephone
town hall earlier this week, Markey spokesman Ben Marter said.
The audience at Wednesday's gathering
appeared largely supportive of Democratic reform plans, with a number of people
arriving with signs prepared by Organizing for
At her
She stressed at both gatherings that
the status quo wasn't an option.
"I do think that our health-
care spending is directly tied to the economic health of this country,"
the Fort Collins Democrat said.
However, one of the nation's leading
political analysts said it appears increasingly unlikely that the Democrats
will be able to pass any sort of comprehensive reform this year.
The president over-reached by trying
to push through major initiatives on health care and climate change in the
midst of an economic catastrophe, said Charlie Cook, publisher of the
nonpartisan Cook Political Report.
"The public trust in government
to get this right may have been eroded enormously by what's happened in the
last year" to the economy, Cook said Tuesday at a Denver health-care
discussion organized by the American Association of Retired Persons.
"Under the best of circumstances this would have been hard, but it's just
a lot harder right now."
The Obama administration has
committed strategic and tactical blunders on health-care reform that make it
difficult, if not impossible, to pass any reform plan this year, Cook said.
"I think the mistakes they made
weren't stupid mistakes, but just because they weren't stupid doesn't mean they
weren't mistakes," he said.
Cook said a key mistake was leaving
the drafting of the specific plan to Congress. He said that amounted to
"outsourcing domestic policy" to congressional leadership.
"There are institutions that are
hated more than Congress, but not many," Cook said.