House Member Markey Admits Medicare will take hit

BY ROBERT MOORE • RobertMoore@coloradoan.com • August 27, 2009

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 Fort Collins on Wednesday.

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 America, a spinoff of Barack Obama's presidential campaign.

At her Colorado State University event Wednesday, Markey repeated many of the themes she's stressed throughout the August recess - she believes the health-care system needs a significant overhaul that focuses on reducing costs, but the proposal crafted by House Democratic leaders is too high.

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.