Tim Kaine in Spotsylvania to Support Social Security

by Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT

The New Year is only five days old, but candidates in the November general election are already on the campaign trail.

Tim Kaine, who is running for reelection to a third term in the U.S. Senate, visited Chancellor’s Village in Spotsylvania Friday morning to receive an endorsement from the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, and to talk about his work protecting these programs.

“Not everything Congress does is great—in fact it probably doesn’t do a lot of things that it should—but if you look at legislation that accomplishes what it was designed to do, you’d have a hard time finding a better law than Social Security,” Kaine said.

Max Richtman, president and CEO of the committee, said the group was formed in 1983 by Sen. James Roosevelt, son of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was president when Social Security was established.

“He was worried about what would happen to Social Security under the Reagan administration and wanted to protect his father’s greatest legacy,” Richtman said. “That legacy was Social Security. And we’ve been doing that all these years.”

Kaine said the combined effects of Social Security and Medicare have been “revolutionary” in preventing poverty and promoting health among senior citizens.

He said his work on Social Security while in the Senate has focused on three areas—protecting against any cuts to benefits, including increases in the retirement age; improving education that goes out about Social Security; and fixing a quirk that prevents employees of federal, state or local government who receive a pension from also receiving their Social Security benefits.

Kaine also talked about improvements to Medicare that are included in the Inflation Reduction Act, which he helped to negotiate as part of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pension committee. One is the cap on insulin for Medicare beneficiaries at $35 per month, which the three major insulin manufacturers have recently announced they will extend to everyone.

Another improvement is that the federal government is now able to negotiate the price of drugs for recipients of Medicare Part D (the prescription drug coverage plan), Kaine said. Previously, the government had to buy drugs at cost established by the pharmaceutical companies for this population, despite being able to negotiate prices for drugs purchased by other government programs, such as the Veterans Administration.

Kaine said the federal government needs to continue monitoring Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors and hospitals, which often decline to accept Medicare patients because they can receive higher levels of reimbursement from private insurance providers.

He also said he is intrigued by the bipartisan proposal put forward last year by senators Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Angus King (I-ME) to shore up the Social Security fund by setting up a separate fund invested in stocks and mutual funds that would yield income for the Social Security fund, beyond what working Americans contribute from their paychecks.

“It is the way many nations run their retirement funds and the way we have run the federal railway retirement fund,” Kaine said.

In an interview with the Advance, Kaine also talked about his Medicare-X proposal, which would work within the Medicare framework to establish a Medicare Exchange public option plan for individuals and small businesses.

Kaine said there aren’t yet enough votes in the Senate, “particularly on the Republican side,” to pass this legislation, but that interest groups are beginning to weigh in on it and that he hopes it will continue to gain traction.

Wrapping up the event, Richtman urged the audience to combat the many myths surrounding Social Security, such as that it’s bankrupt.

“It’s not bankrupt—it has to be fixed and soon, but it’s not bankrupt,” he said. “The only way it could be broke is if we have 100% unemployment and no money was coming in.”

He said Social Security is not an entitlement, but an earned benefit and that the money is invested in government bonds.

“These are important arguments to make when you have opponents of Social Security who want to cut the program or privatize the program and reduce the benefits,” Richtman said.

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