Report Title:

Medicare Copayments; Outpatient Hospital Services

WHEREAS, approximately 40,000,000 senior citizens in the United States, the majority of whom are aged sixty-five or older, receive their health insurance coverage through the federal Medicare program; and

WHEREAS, the number of Medicare beneficiaries is rapidly increasing and will increase at an even faster rate as the baby boom generation begins retiring and there are increasingly fewer workers to support Medicare through payroll taxes; and

WHEREAS, senior citizens on Medicare believe that they are required to pay twenty per cent of the costs of hospital outpatient treatment as their co-payment; and

WHEREAS, senior citizens are actually being overcharged for their copayment for hospital outpatient treatment services and are required to pay more than twenty per cent; and

WHEREAS, these copayment overcharges are costing America's senior citizens billions of dollars a year and are increasing their Medicare supplemental insurance payments; and

WHEREAS, the United States Congress has enacted a scheme that would lower senior citizens' true copayment rate to a true twenty per cent and the Health Care Financing Administration was directed in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 to reduce senior citizens' copayments for outpatient hospital services to a true twenty per cent; and

WHEREAS, it has been estimated by the Health Care Financing Administration and the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission that the phase-in period to reduce senior citizens' copayments could take as long as forty years to be completed; and

WHEREAS, today’s senior citizens deserve an immediate reduction in their hospital outpatient treatment copayments to a true twenty per cent to stop these overcharges; now, therefore,

BE IT RESOLVED by the House of Representatives of the Twenty-first Legislature of the State of Hawaii, Regular Session of 2001, that the United States Congress is urged to favorably address legislation that gives America's senior citizens a rapid reduction in their hospital outpatient copayments; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that certified copies of this Resolution be transmitted to the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, the President of the United States Senate, and to the members of Hawaii's congressional delegation.