AARP’s Got Their Back
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”I have the distinct honor of introducing a great American who
has for all of his life worked for those who are in need and
fought for the middle class,” Barry Rand, chief executive officer
of AARP, said as he introduced Vice President Joe Biden last
Thursday in Alexandria, Virginia.
Rand was addressing an audience of mostly older Americans, some
adorned with red vests stamped with the AARP logo, about the
urgent need for health care legislation. The gathering, which
also included Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen
Sebelius and White House Health czar Nancy-Ann DeParle, was
billed as a meeting of Biden’s “Middle Class Task
Force.”
After taking the lectern, Biden expressed delight at having the
backing of AARP.
“I was a United States Senator since I was 29 years old, my
experience is I’ve never lost with the AARP behind me,” he
boasted.
The event was just the latest sign of the strong ties that the
nation’s largest organization of older Americans has forged with
the Obama administration as part of its push to overhaul
America’s health care system.
“Together, we will complete the mission for comprehensive health
care reform,” Rand declared at a recent White House event to
announce a deal between AARP and the pharmaceutical industry.
“Thank you for your leadership on this issue, Mr. President.”
During the current debate, AARP has funded ads pushing for health
care legislation and hosted town-hall style events throughout the
country. It has set up a website called “Health Action
Now,” which urges visitors to sign a petition, imploring,
“President Obama has promised health reform before the end of the
year — but we need to make sure that Congress follows through.”
The site even has a
feature in which users enter their phone number, wait for
their phone to ring, and are automatically connected to their
member of Congress, so that they can deliver AARP’s message that
“the time for action is now.”
Of course, with one party controlling the White House and both
chambers of Congress, “action now” effectively means supporting
Democratic legislation.
AARP aims to represent the interests of Americans over 50 years
old. In the 2008 presidential election, the 45 to 64 age group
split their votes nearly evenly, 50 percent for Obama and 49
percent for McCain, while McCain comfortably beat Obama in the
over-65 age group, 53 percent to 45 percent. Clearly, AARP
includes Republicans among its 40 million members, many of whom
join the group to purchase insurance or to enjoy discounts. But
the group routinely uses its money and influence to promote
policies that would result in higher taxes and a larger role for
government.
Though AARP bills itself as nonpartisan, its support for the
current administration’s policies stands in stark contrast to the
aggressive campaign it waged to help kill President Bush’s drive
to reform Social Security in 2005. AARP’s backing of Obama’s
health care agenda has not been deterred even though he has
proposed paying for universal health care, in part, with $622
billion in Medicare cuts over 10 years.
Rand, who took the helm at AARP in March, was a strong backer of
Obama in last year’s election, having
contributed a total of $8,900 to the campaign’s various
committees.
The seniors’ group does not make campaign contributions, but at
the request of TAS, the Center for Responsive Politics
analyzed federal election data of those who listed themselves as
employees of AARP. While the actual dollar figures involved are
low and there were only 123 such records available for the 2008
election cycle, the partisan breakdown was lopsided.
The analysis found that individuals linked to AARP gave $48,801
to Democratic candidates, party committees, and leadership PACs,
compared with only $5,121 to Republicans — meaning more than 90
percent of the money went to Democrats. (These figures do not
include those AARP employees who may have contributed but did not
identify their employer, nor did they include Rand, who did not
work for the group until this year.)
When contacted for this article, representatives for AARP pushed
back strongly against the insinuation that they were a partisan
group, and defended the rationale for their stances in support of
the Obama administration.
“The President has proposed savings in Medicare and we have
basically been in favor of trying to reduce the cost of Medicare
by reducing waste and fraud and finding efficiencies,” said David
Certner, director of legislative policy at AARP. “That’s been our
goal in this whole context, to see if we can come up with ways to
lower the cost of Medicare, which will help make the program
strong and still protect our beneficiaries from higher costs,
copays, premiums, deductibles and so forth.”
He added that a major goal for AARP is to make sure that any
reform eliminates the so-called “donut hole,” which is a gap in
subsidies under the Medicare prescription drug plan.
The Medicare proposals outlined by the Obama administration
include reducing hospital subsidies, slashing payments to private
insurers as part of the Medicare Advantage program, and
eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse.
In 2006, when Bush proposed far smaller Medicare cuts of $105
billion over 10 years, USA Today
quoted an AARP spokesman as saying, “The Congress, in an
election year, is not going to pass these disastrous provisions.”
But Certner said that was different. “We oppose across-the-board
type cuts,” he explained. “These are cuts that don’t really look
at trying to get efficiencies or savings that make sense, they
just whack across-the-board and can harm the health care system.”
Conservatives have argued that the Obama administration’s
proposal to employ “comparative effectiveness research” will open
the door for rationing care in the United States as such research
has done in government-run health care systems. In Britain, for
instance, the National Institute for Health and Clinical
Excellence (NICE)
places a monetary value on life and allocates health care
resources accordingly. Such a system tends to disproportionately
affect elderly patients who are nearing the end of their days.
Certner said it was wrong to argue that Obama is proposing
something similar for the U.S.
“You’ve just described comparative effectiveness research in an
English way,” he responded. “I think we’re talking about a
different kind of understanding of what we need to do in our
system, which is evidence-based research, which is to do more
research on what drugs and procedures work best, and then be able
to give that research to doctors and patients so they can make
the best choices for themselves.”
Jim Dau, an AARP spokesman, added: “This is really about
providing doctors and patients about the best possible tools. It
just seems like a no-brainer.”
Asked to name a single initiative on which AARP has opposed the
Obama administration, both Dau and Certner drew a blank, before
rejecting the premise of the question.
“It’s a little premature for that question just yet,” Certner
said, stressing that the administration was still in its infancy
and that no final health care legislation that can be tied to
Obama yet exists. The group, did, however, criticize the Senate
Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP) bill for
language that would prolong the development of generic
alternatives to costly biologic drugs, Certner noted.
While AARP representatives argue that the organization just wants
what’s best for its members, philosophically, the group’s
tendency is to support legislation that would expand the role of
the federal government.
In making the case that AARP is truly nonpartisan,
representatives noted that they were attacked by liberals for
cooperating with the Bush administration on the Medicare
prescription drug bill. But that was an example of a Republican
president pushing the largest expansion of entitlements since the
Great Society.
While AARP is generally supportive of the current effort to
increase government’s role in health care, representatives swept
aside many small-government alternative proposals as wrong-headed
and insufficient.
Asked about proposals to allow individuals to purchase insurance
across state lines, which would make it easier for Americans to
obtain more modest health insurance coverage with lower premiums,
Certner argued, “The problem is that you’d have all the
regulation at the state level undone, and everybody could get
cheap and under-regulated insurance from the state that has the
lowest standards.” That was precisely the argument that Obama
used against Sen. John McCain during last year’s campaign.
Certner said that while AARP would be open to the idea of
changing the tax code that currently subsidizes employer-based
health care to the disadvantage of individuals purchasing
coverage on their own, he insisted that health care legislation
would also need to include more regulations aimed at forcing
insurers to cover those with preexisting conditions, and to limit
their ability to discriminate based on age.
AARP will continue to work with both parties toward legislation
that had wide support, he said, but like the Obama
administration, the group would be satisfied with a partisan bill
if necessary.
“We’ve been keeping up our drumbeat of trying to get a broad
coalition, and a broad bill passed by Congress,” Certner said.
“But we are also determined to try and get health care reform
done this year.”
