By skyforbes 
Tim Canova
Chair, Progress For All
Millions of senior citizens depend on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security — a safety net that’s been described as a three-legged stool for their retirement years. That stool is about to be cut from underneath us by the nomination of Georgia Congressman Tom Price to head President Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services Department.
Tom Price, with a net worth of more than $13 million, is a longtime lackey of health-care industry profiteers. He has spent his entire career attempting to destroy Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. In his current position as the Chair of the House Budget Committee, Price has said that he and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan will move to privatize and voucherize Medicare in 2017.
Price has already voted for Speaker Ryan’s budget plan, which would replace Medicare with a voucher system, meaning seniors would pay significantly more for their healthcare while relying on coupons for their health care. Since then, Price reinforced his support for cutting Medicare’s budget by $449 billion and Medicaid by $1 trillion. Such large cuts are no doubt intended to pave the way to privatize both programs. That didn’t sit well with Senator Bernie Sanders. At a subsequent Senate committee hearing, Bernie hammered Price on the future of these safety net programs and pointed out that Donald Trump said over and over during his campaign that he would not touch Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security. All Price could say was that “he had not had any discussions with President Trump on these issues.”
After the hearing, Bernie tweeted:
#PriceIsWrong
Bernie is right: Tom Price is the wrong person to head Health and Human Services.
Tom Price has long been in the pockets of the big drug and insurance companies. While in Congress, he received $178,000 in donations from the pharmaceutical industry. According to Price’s financial disclosures, he purchased more than $300,000 in medical stocks and sold them at the very same time he was pushing legislation that would affect the share prices of these stocks.
No wonder Tom Price has a lifetime pro-retiree score of just 4% from the National Alliance for Retired Americans — which represents 4.2 million retirees across the country.
The Price nominations was adamantly opposed from the get go by the National Nurses United, one of the largest nurses unions and one of the first unions to endorse Bernie’s campaign as well as my own campaign last year against Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
National Nurses United said, “It is clear that Rep. Price will pursue policies that substantially erode our nation’s health and security — eliminate health coverage, reduce access, shifting more costs to working people and their families, and throwing our most sick and vulnerable fellow Americans to the mercy of the healthcare industry.”
This week Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee sided with the American people by boycotting a vote on Tom Price. The very next day, Republicans changed the rules and voted to confirm Price despite the absence of every Democratic committee member. Price will go before the full Senate for a vote in the next few days.
We cannot turn the clock back many decades to a time before the New Deal when millions of seniors simply went without health care. Working together we must beat back this dangerous nomination and protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — hugely important parts of the social safety net for all of us.
For more information, see www.ProgressForAll.org