Lexington Dispatch: Hagan campaigns at Lexington nursing home

Lexington Dispatch
Seth Stratton
October 6, 2008

Involved in a tight race for the U.S. Senate, state Sen. Kay Hagan stopped in Lexington on Monday to introduce seniors and senior care workers at The Brian Center to a plan focused on the interests of many seniors.

Hagan’s plan would work specifically on the issues of ensuring secure retirements, providing quality care for seniors and protecting seniors from fraud and other types of abuse. After touring the nursing care facility with the center’s staff, Hagan spoke to some of the facility’s 96 residents during lunch.

Hagan, a Democrat and Greensboro attorney who is challenging Republican incumbent Sen. Elizabeth Dole, spoke about a tough time in her life when her mother suffered a stroke and needed rehabilitation.

“It’s a family member; it greatly affected me. And it’s just a very devastating blow to an individual to lose your independence like that. She was a young, vibrant adult that all of a sudden could no longer drive or take care of herself. So facilities like this, I think are extremely important, rehab facilities,” Hagan said.

The state senator recently finished a series of policies directed at improving the quality of life for seniors. Her plan opposes any privatization of Social Security, about which she wrote, “the financial crisis on Wall Street demonstrates the danger of gambling seniors’ Social Security money in the volatile financial markets.”

On a related topic, Hagan said the recently passed federal bailout package merely “plugged a few leaks.”

“We’ve got to have oversight and accountability on the financial institutions. I think we need to have much stronger limits on corporate CEO pay and golden parachutes. I think we’ve got to have better mechanisms to keep people in their homes. I want to be sure that the taxpayer, Main Street taxpayer, middle-class people are not the ones stuck with this …,” Hagan said. “I think we need to be sure we’ve got much more counseling and stricter laws against predatory lending.”

Hagan said financial literacy is part of the solution. Educating all North Carolinians, especially students and seniors, would hopefully prevent another sub-prime mortgage crisis. She cited a bill she filed last year as a state senator which would fund math teachers in every N.C. high school to teach a five-day course on financial literacy.

She also said she would support federal funding of programs which educate seniors on “deceptive sweepstakes and telemarketing schemes and insurance fraud by long-term care insurers.”

But Hagan also said financial institutions need to take responsibility for risky lending practices.

“I’m not putting all the blame on the consumers because I think there was definitely greed and in some cases fraudulent behavior on the institutions,” Hagan said.

Hagan also said it was important for people to take better care of themselves and said a chronic disease management program in the state employee health insurance plan has saved the state millions of dollars. From a federal standpoint, Hagan said it is “ludicrous” that the Medicare prescription drug law prohibits the agency from negotiating for lower prescription drug prices.

“We need to get down the cost of delivery of healthcare in the U.S.,” Hagan said. She said Dole, her opponent, hasn’t “done much of anything” to lower the cost of health care or otherwise.

Other parts of Hagan’s plan include a universal 401(k) retirement savings plan for any employee who works for a company that offers it; tax credits for small businesses that automatically enroll employees in individual retirement accounts; and tougher legislation and more resources to protect working seniors from age discrimination. She also wants more transparency of health care workers, wants to encourage more doctors to become geriatricians and wants to provide more money for low-income seniors to pay their heating and cooling bills.

Hagan also spent part of the day in Winston-Salem at the Armed Forces Institute for Regenerative Medicine, which conducts research on treatments for wounded soldiers.

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