By ERIC FRANCIS

WHITE RIVER JUNCTION - The rapidly rising costs of fuel and prescription drugs dominated a discussion between forty senior citizens and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders at the American Legion Saturday evening.

"A lot of people are getting discouraged with what is going on in Washington," noted Sanders as he related how his office had appealed on their website for voters to send in stories of how they were being effected by the current economic downturn.

"We got over 700 responses and it will break your heart because we are hearing from people old and young as the middle class, in my view, collapses," Sanders told the subdued gathering.

Seniors who live on fixed incomes have been hit especially hard by the rising costs of home heating oil at a time when the federal LIHEAP program, which subsidizes heating fuel for low-income residents, is seeing more demand and less funding, Sanders said.

He recounted an email from an elderly resident who said that at first they had been relieved last fall to lock in an 800 gallon pre-buy of oil at $2.46 a gallon to supplement their wood stove; however, after they suffered an injury that left them unable to chop wood they ended up having to turn the thermostat back and back to 50 degrees and finally forego using hot water to wash clothes because of the prohibitive cost of ordering more fuel.

The seniors gathered Saturday night directed much of their ire for the pharmaceutical industry.

One resident's story about how she recently survived breast cancer gotSanders to blurt out an expletive when she described paying $65 a month in Vermont for a vital drug only to go to Mexico and find she could buy the same prescription in the same bottle at a cost of $4.65 for a three-month supply.

"My son was being charged $600 for eyeglasses here so I said to him Send me down your prescription,' and we got them in Mexico for $180. We were shocked," she told the senator.

"Of all the powerful special interests in Washington, probably the most powerful is the drug companies," Sanders told the gathering. "These guys are so powerful they never lose.

Sanders noted that a provision written into the Medicare Reform Act of 2003 explicitly prohibits Medicare by law from negotiating for bulk discounts on behalf of its 44 million patients, something that the VA Hospital system - and dozens of foreign health care systems like those in Canada and Mexico do routinely.

"There are six hundred lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry alone," Sanders noted. "These people pay hundreds of millions of dollars to make sure you pay the highest prices in the world."

Adding injury to insult is "the donut hole" - a gap in the Medicare Part D prescription drug plans that, despite a recent doubling of co-pay costs, leaves anyone who's monthly drug bill costs less than $5,500 a month but more than $2,500 to fend for themselves.

Sanders argued that the only real solution to the spiraling costs of drugs and overall health care, which by some estimates could consume 20 percent of the nation's gross domestic product by the year 2015, at a time when no other Western country is over single digits, is to move to a national heath system.

"What we have today is not a health care system," Sanders stressed, "What we have is a health care industry. Every other country on Earth understands that."

"I'm on the budget committee. I see where the money goes," Sanders continued. "We are not some Third World country. We have the resources…we just need to change our priorities."

Joan Randall of the Thompson Senior Center in Woodstock described rising energy prices as the most obvious threat facing seniors in Windsor County right now. Describing the increasing requests for take-out meals coming in recent months, Randall said, "the cost of food is rising beyond the reach of seniors in our area."

Joyce Lemire of the Southeastern Vermont Council on Aging agreed, noting that while two-thirds of the seniors who take advantage of the council's 22 sites which provide meals in Windsor and Windham counties are over the age of 75 and live alone, the federal government has level funded the program for the past five years even as food and gas prices are spiking.

"At the end of the day there comes a point where, if all the people stand up and demand change, then all of the money in the world can't stop it," Sanders said, "Right now people want transformative action. I think we are at that moment in history."