If you rely on Medicare, here's how health care reform will affect you: Health care reform will improve access to primary care. Medicare will reward doctors for taking better care of you, providing services that make sure you get "accessible, continuous, coordinated, and comprehensive care.” Right now primary care doctors don't get paid for the time they spend helping you make decisions and helping to coordinate your care across multiple specialists. Who pays attention to whether your medications from one doctor work with the ones given to you by another? Under health care reform, doctors who take the time to help patients in these ways will qualify for higher reimbursement rates and a five percent payment bonus. For the first time, doctors will also get paid for helping you with advanced care planning like preparing a living will and identifying someone to make medical decisions for you if you are unable to. These are important protections for a seriously ill patient's wishes and well being. What will health care reform do to Medicare? Call your Senators and Representatives and tell them you want the protections in the HELP Bill and HR Tell them you want Medicare to benefit from health care reform. Senator Kay Hagan (D-NC): 701 Green Valley Road Suite 201, Greensboro, NC 27408; Phone: (336) or 310 New Bern Ave., Raleigh, Phone (919) Senator Richard Burr (R-NC): 2000 West First Street Suite 508, Winston-Salem, NC 27104; Phone: (336) or (800) Representative David Price (D-NC): NC Mutual Building,411 W. Chapel Hill Street, 9th Floor, Durham, NC Phone: What won’t health care reform do for Medicare recipients? Health care reform will not ration health care for Medicare recipients. It will not limit Medicare recipients’ care or choice of doctors. It will not encourage euthanasia. This flyer prepared for Durham for Obama Health Care Group 2009 Fight back against these lies and scare tactics designed to protect insurance companies, not Medicare recipients.

Health care reform will hold Medicare Advantage Programs to the same standards as regular Medicare fee for service programs. Right now Medicare Advantage providers are paid according to how many people are on their rolls, not for what services they offer or how well-cared for these patients are. As a result, Medicare Advantage providers make more money if they give you less care. This is what health care reform wants to change. Medicare Advantage programs will no longer be allowed to charge higher co- pays than regular Medicare programs. There will be financial incentives for programs to provide better services, and you will be able to get better information about which programs are of high quality and improved quality, and which are not. Medicare Advantage Plans and Prescription Drug Plans that provide false information and misleading advertising to consumers will be faced with penalties high enough to change these practices. Health care reform will give individuals who have had a kidney transplant a chance for a better life by paying for immunosuppressant drugs as long as a person needs them. Right now, Medicare only pays for immunosuppressant drugs for three years, even though you need these drugs for the rest of your life in order to keep a kidney transplant. If you don't have another way to pay for these drugs, you must go on dialysis, which Medicare will pay for. This is the primary reason that the US has poor survival rates for people with kidney transplants. Health care reform will try to improve quality of care in a number of different ways: Hospitals will be held accountable for increasing quality of care in two ways: decreasing hospital-based infections and decreasing re-admissions by making sure patients are really ready to leave before discharging them. The Secretary of HHS will set national priorities for improvement and hold doctors, hospitals, nursing homes and other health care facilities accountable for meeting new patient-centered and population-based quality measures. These will be phased in slowly, giving everyone a chance to meet them. Pilot projects will be set up to try out ways of delivering services that some researchers believe will be more effective -- like individual and community medical homes. Research will be funded on the comparative effectiveness of different ways of treating a medical problem, so that we have the information we need to evaluate treatments a doctor proposes and choose the best one for us. Health care reform will decrease out-of-pocket costs for everyone. There will be no more co-pays for preventive care. The donut hole in coverage for prescription drugs will decrease gradually over 10 years. And drug companies will be required to charge no more than 50% of the cost for any drugs you need while you are in the donut hole. If your major source of income is Social Security, you will be able to quality for a low income subsidy for all Medicare-related costs.