Vermont senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders spoke on the Senate floor Monday about the critical need to reauthorize and to increase funding for the Older Americans Act (OAA), which expired in 2011. As The Hill reported, "Only 10 percent of nearly 17 million older adults in low-income households receive meals from the federal government, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO)."
Here is Sen. Sanders' speech in its entirety:
https://www.youtube.com/... Mr. President, I want to touch on an issue that does not get, I think, the attention that it deserves. My view is that a nation is judged not by how many billionaires and millionaires it has, but by how it treats the most vulnerable people among us.And if we look at the greatness of a nation in that respect, the sad truth is that the United States today does not get particularly high marks. And that is true not only in the way we treat our children, but it is also true in the way we treat our seniors.
Mr. President, yesterday at my request, the Government Accountability Office (the GAO) released a new report that found that nearly 4 million seniors in our country are what they call "food insecure." And that means that these seniors do not know where their next meal is coming from. What that means is that nearly 4 million American seniors may skip dinner tonight because they do not have enough money to buy food today.
Millions of seniors every day, in my state of Vermont and around this country, have to juggle with their limited budgets their ability to buy food, their ability to buy medicine, or, in the wintertime, their ability to keep themselves warm in their homes. Those are not the choices that seniors in this country should be forced to make.
Transcript of Sen. Sanders' speech continues below.