
..::: NEWS RELEASE
..::: SEPTEMBER 9, 2003
Grass-Roots Organization: Medicare Expansion Is Wrong
NEWPORT BEACH, CALIFORNIAWith the Medicare prescription drug plan
for seniors being pieced together in a Congressional conference
committee, the grass-roots Americans for Free Choice In Medicine (AFCM)
challenged the notion that seniors need drug subsidiesor that the
state has the moral right to impose them.
"According to those who favor Medicare drug
subsidies, retired Americans can't afford prescription drugs. Yet
today's seniors are among the richest generations of older humans in
history," Richard E. Ralston, AFCM's executive director, insisted in an
op-ed.
"There’s no doubt drug costs are rising," Ralston
acknowledged. "but where is the evidence that most seniors have to
choose between drugs and dinner?"
Ralston argued that Congress and the White House
ought to embrace the concept of choice in medicine and kill any attempt
to expand Medicare.
"The fact that some people have a tough time paying
for drugs does not make it right for the government to force everyone to
use and pay for government-run health care. Someone's need is not a
claim on everyone else's income," he explained.
Americans for Free Choice in Medicine, (AFCM),
founded in 1993, is the nation's only educational organization based on
individual rights, personal responsibility and free market ideas in
medicine.
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Copyright © 2003 Americans for Free Choice in Medicine. All rights reserved.
For reprint permission, contact AFCM.
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