Name: Weekly Address: Celebrating Fifty Years of Medicare and Medicaid
Uploaded: 2016-05-09T01:24:11.000Z
Duration: 3 min 42 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

This week, there was a big birthday you might have missed.

Medicare and Medicaid turned 50 years old.

If one of the best measures of a country is how it treats

its more vulnerable citizens - seniors, the poor,

the sick - then America has a lot to be proud of.

Before Social Security, too many seniors lived in poverty.

Before Medicare, only half had some form of health insurance.

Before Medicaid, parents often had no help covering

the cost of care for a child with a disability.

But as Americans, we declared that our citizens

deserve a basic measure of security and dignity.

And today, the poverty rate for seniors is less

than half of what it was fifty years ago.

Every American over 65 has access to affordable

And today, we're finally finishing the job -

into law, the uninsured rate for all Americans has

These promises we made as a nation have saved millions

of our own people from poverty and hardship,

allowing us new freedom, new independence,

and the chance to live longer, better lives.

These endeavors - these American endeavors - they didn't

They reaffirmed that we are a great country.

And a great country keeps the promises it makes.

Today, we're often told that Medicare and Medicaid

But that's usually a political excuse to cut their funding,

privatize them, or phase them out entirely - all of which

The truth is, these programs aren't in crisis.

Nor have they kept us from cutting our deficits

What is true is that every month, another 250,000

that delivers efficient, high-quality care.

we'll have to make smart changes over time,

Today, we're actually proving that's possible.

The Affordable Care Act has already helped secure

The Affordable Care Act has saved more than nine million

folks on Medicare 15 billion dollars on their

It has expanded Medicaid to help cover 12.8 million more

Americans, and to help more seniors live independently.

And we're moving our health care system toward models

that reward the quality of the care you receive,

That means healthier Americans and a healthier

Today, these programs are so fundamental to our way

of life that it's easy to forget how hard people

When JFK and LBJ worked to create Medicare,

the cynics said it would take away our freedom.

But ultimately, we came to see these programs for

what they truly are - a promise that if we work hard,

and play by the rules, we'll be rewarded with

and the freedom to live our lives as we want.

It's a promise that previous generations made to us,

and a promise that our generation has to keep.