Utah may lose $301 million in state Medicare and Social Security in 1994 if President Bush's balanced budget amendment passes, a health advocacy group for senior citizens says.
"This amendment will slash Social Security benefits for 42 million Americans, forcing more than a million older Americans into poverty," Ron Pollack, director of Families United for Senior Action, said Monday.The group estimated that each Medicare beneficiary in Utah would lose $564 a year and each Social Security beneficiary in Utah would lose $998 a year.
"This is a dagger in the heart of Medicare and Social Security programs, slashing these programs and making them unaffordable for millions of senior citizens," Pollack said.
The estimated reduction in benefits assumes that all programs are reduced by the proportion the program constitutes of the total budget times the deficit amount.
All of Utah's members of Congress have supported a balanced budget amendment to help reduce the deficit.
All of its House members - Democrats Wayne Owens and Bill Orton and Republican Jim Hansen - signed a petition to force a vote on the amendment on Wednesday. Several alternatives will also be considered, including some designed not to affect Social Security.
Joining Pollack at the press conference were leaders of several major national seniors' groups who outlined the nationwide grass roots mobilization now under way to defeat the balanced budget amendment in the House.
"Social Security is self-financing and, in fact, running a large surplus! It is not part of the problem. It should not, therefore, be part of the solution," said Martha A. McSteen, president of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare.
"The balanced budget proposal now pending in the House of Representatives, if passed, will roll back the 1990 law removing Social Security from the budget. This would likely result in a decrease in Social Security benefits, or an increase in either payroll taxes or taxes on Social Security benefits," McSteen said.
But the groups' efforts to keep the bill from passing may be a losing battle. It looks like the amendment will pass this week with 13 votes more than it needs in the House, but it may be closer in the Senate.
If two-thirds of both houses agree, the amendment would be submitted to the states. If three-fourths of the states agree, it would become part of the U.S. Constitution. Two years after ratification, the amendment would take effect, and the budget would have to be balanced.
Pollack believes that the way to balance the budget is to tax the rich, those, he believes, who have benefited from government spending in the last decade.
"Those who went to the party should pay for the party," Pollack said.