Barbara J.

Easterling North Carolina Alliance for Retired Americans June 5, 2013 Thank you for the opportunity to be here today. It is always great to join the North Carolina Alliance, one of our most active, most successful state chapters. I would like to recognize James Andrews for all that he and the North Carolina AFL-CIO have done to build and grow the state Alliance. Thank for your outstanding support. I would like to give a special thanks to Jim Moore and the board of the North Carolina Alliance. You have traveled to every corner of this large state to grow the retiree movement. The recent Affiliations you have achieved show just how hard you are working. I also want to thank Bill Dworkin and Heather McLaughlin for their work in putting together todays convention. To the entire North Carolina Alliance, thank you. You have helped educate and mobilize both retirees and workers. North Carolina is such an important state in every election, so we need as many politically savvy seniors as we can. I was very impressed at your great work around last Septembers Democratic National Convention. You helped organize a large seniors caucus that made people more aware of the threats to Medicare and Social Security. I also want to recognize the North Carolina Alliances work on the Elder Economic S ecurity Initiative. You helped call attention to the tough economic circumstances facing seniors across this state. Too many politicians and the media think that seniors have it made that were all living the life of luxury. But that is just not true. Your work on this Economic Security Initiative made a big difference in helping to setting the record straight. We are so fortunate to have such great retiree activists here in North Carolina. This is a challenging place to organize for progressive change, so we appreciate your hard work. I know the Alliance has asked a lot of you in the past few years, but these are the times we live in. Too many people in Washington and in the media continue to target Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for cold, terribly unfair cuts. They ask those with the least to sacrifice the most. They give outrageous tax breaks to the wealthy and to big corporations. They put two unfunded wars onto the nations credit card. And they ask the people who did not cause these problems to pay the price to clean it up. Until we change this, Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid will never be on solid ground.

Each new crisis, each new high-stakes drama in Washington, is yet another battle in our long fight for social and economic justice. There will always be a loud, vocal minority of people who will try to stand in the way of progress. When Franklin Roosevelt was fighting for Social Security in the 1930s, some people said it would ruin the nation. In 1961 nine years before Paul Ryan was even born and 35 years before Fox News began polluting the airwaves Ronald Reagan opposed creating Medicare. He called it socialized medicine. He said it would bankrupt our country. I mention this as a reminder that these battles did not begin yesterday, and they wont be over by tomorrow. We have no choice but to keep up the fight. There are common themes that unite everything that we as retiree activists are fighting for. Call us old school, but we believe that the promises made through Social Security and private pensions must be honored in full. We believe that Medicare should take care better care of seniors health than CEOs wealth. We believe in sacrifice when times get tough, but also that we should not ask those with the least to sacrifice the most. This is what unites us. This is why we are lifelong activists. The issues we are discussing today whether they are local, state, or federal - are all part of our larger goal of trying to enjoy a happy, healthy, and economically secure retirement. Today, I want to discuss Social Security and Medicare. The latest news on Social Security is a proposal to lower future Cost-of-Living Adjustments, COLAs. It would do this by changing the statistical formula that the government uses to calculate the rate of inflation that sets COLAs. Washington policymakers have a cold, technical name for this idea they call it the Chained CPI, for Consumer Price Index. But for seniors, it would be called something very different and far more painful a cut in the benefits you need to make ends meet each month. If you retired today at age 65, the Chained-CPI would lower your Social Security benefits by $6,000 over 15 years. The average Social Security check is not much more than $1000 per month. For many retirees this is their only source of income. I cant imagine how they could get by on anything less. The COLA is meant to help us keep up with inflation. But this is harder for seniors than for people of other ages. This is because we spend a far greater percentage of our income on health care than younger people. For other purchases, you can find a lower-priced substitute. But for health care, thats a lot harder to do.

3 So not only is this proposed cut a terrible policy choice, but it also has no place in deficit reduction talks. The mere mention of it fuels the false and corrosive myth that Social Security causes the budget deficit. This is flat-out wrong. Sometimes people forget the basic facts about Social Security. It is not a hand-out. It is something you earned and paid for each and every day on the job. We cannot allow workers and retirees to pay the price for a problem they did not create. Instead, we should ask big corporations and their CEOs to finally pay their fair share in taxes. The Alliance is working with Senators and Congressmen on a resolution to stop the ChainedCPI. Because of your hard work and great lobbying, Senator Kay Hagan has signed on in support of this resolution. If you are interested in helping with the rest of the North Carolina delegation, please see me or Jim or Heather afterwards and we can give you more information. Social Security gives todays workers hope that they will someday enjoy a safe and secure retirement. We must support these Senate and House resolutions and reject this dangerous idea. We must keep the promise of a strong Social Security alive for generations to come. And we must also keep the promise of Medicare alive. Once again, Paul Ryan and the House Republicans are selling their budget schemes to cut Medicare. Paul Ryans budget chooses ideology over the needs of seniors. It would privatize Medi care, making it yet another public good that gets sold off for corporate gain. Paul Ryan has some fancy words for his Medicare plans. He talks about premium support and vouchers. But the truth is, he is doing the bidding of the big insurance companies. He would push retirees toward buying health insurance in the costly, unfair private market. The very reason Medicare was created was so that seniors would not have to get their health coverage this way. Paul Ryan would undo nearly 50 years of Medicare success, fundamentally changing it in a way that would make Wall Streets health into Medicares top priority. Under the Ryan budget, Medicare would be little more than an empty promise. We cannot let this happen. My fellow seniors, we owe it to todays workers to keep the promise of Medicare alive for generations to come. Medicare always seems to be on the chopping block whenever people want to lower the federal deficit. They talk about raising the eligibility age. They talk about raising premiums. They talk

4 about cutting back benefits, such as the many new ways that the Affordable Care Act helps us better afford to see a doctor and fill a prescription. Whatever the idea is, it always seems like seniors are the ones asked to sacrifice. But I have a question for you, what about the big drug companies? Ever since the Medicare prescription drug law was passed in 2003, the big drug companies keep making record profits. Americans pay the highest drug prices in the world. So where does all that money go? None of us were born yesterday so I think we all have a pretty good idea who gets rich every time we get sick. Listen to these paychecks in 2012, the CEO of Johnson & Johnson made $40 million. The head of Pfizer, $25 million. The CEO of Eli Lily was the poor kid on the block, having to scrape by on just $14 million that year. Poor guy must be clipping coupons Over the last decade, the 11 major pharmaceutical companies made a combined $711 billion in profits. When you think about all the people out there struggling to afford their prescriptions, this is absolutely disgusting. So instead of targeting our Medicare for cuts, why dont we close some of the loopholes and corporate welfare that these companies get every year in Washington? For example, Medicare is specifically prohibited from negotiating volume discounts from the big drug companies. This was written into the 2003 drug law. Can you believe that? Every savvy consumer knows that you save money when you buy in bulk. Thats why places like Costco are packed every day. If we ended this sweetheart deal that the drug lobbyists got put into law, we would save $141 billion over ten years. In closing, today is great chance for us to be better educated and organized. These issues affect every generation in a family. When someone has a health or financial problem, it impacts everyone. And todays workers, who are struggling to get by, need to have the hope and faith that programs they are paying for in every paycheck Social Security and Medicare will be there for them when they retire. We cannot be the last generation to retire. We must stand together not just for people our age, but also for our children and grandchildrens gener ations. So what should we do? To me, we need to clear up all the misinformation that is being aimed at seniors. Right-wing politicians, the media, the big corporations they are all trying to scare us. Whether they are phony warnings about Medicare and Social Security going bankrupt, or the outright lies about public workers and their retirement benefits it just never ends.

5 So how can we do better? How can we educate and mobilize more seniors in support of elected officials that are on our side? How do we combat all this misinformation? Thats where all of us come in. We must do everything we can to clear up the lies that people hear every time they turn on their TV or radio or computer. We must push our boundaries, push our comfort zones, and reach out to new people and places. I believe that doing more with on-line communications tools such as e-mail, Facebook, and YouTube will help us reach new people. The Alliance now has a special e-mail list for those who are most active, most dedicated to the fights we will have this year. We have about 10,000 people on this list, and to make sure you are on it, please see one of us here today. I believe we need to do a major outreach to younger generations. Some of our state Alliance chapters have begun going to college campuses to help educate students. Younger generations are just trying to keep their heads above water hold onto their jobs, raise their kids, pay their bills so they are not thinking too much about their retirement. Politicians know this, and thats why many of their schemes for Social Security and Medicare and pensions may leave current retirees alone, but slash benefits for those who are younger. We cannot allow this to happen. We cannot be the last generation of Americans who ever gets to retire. Everything we fight for from state and local legislation to Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid is all part of the larger fight for justice and fairness. Yes, we are seniors advocates, and many of us are labor advocates. But we are much more than that. We are parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends and neighbors. We are united by our shared commitment to fairness and justice and opportunity. Through good days and bad, we keep up the fight because of how much we care about our children and grandchildren and all the generations that will follow us. My fellow retirees, thank you for all you do. We have accomplished so much, we have every reason to be proud. But in times like these, we cannot sit back and rest on our laurels. We face great challenges. We face opponents who will spend more in one year than all of us, combined, will ever spend in our lifetimes. But they will never be able to outwork us I am confident that if we do what we do best organize, educate, mobilize, work harder than anyone else we can continue to make life better for people of all ages. For retirees like us, our working days may be over, but our fighting spirit burns stronger than ever. Thank you.