CHAMPAIGN – Two organizations are urging Illinoisans to fight a proposed federal-deficit-reduction plan that would include cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

Both programs are lifelines to many of the elderly, and trimming them would hurt millions of low-income and middle-class Americans, said representatives of Champaign County Health Care Consumers and the Illinois Alliance for Retired Americans.

The two organizations held a press conference in Champaign on Tuesday morning to urge everyone to contact two Illinois Democrats serving on the 18-member National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform – U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin and U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Evanston – without delay.

The commission is charged with completing a deficit-reduction plan by Dec. 1, but in order for the plan to be recommended to Congress, 14 of the 18 members must approve it.

Health Care Consumers and the Illinois Alliance for Retired Americans representatives warn the deficit-reduction proposal by commission co-chairs Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles includes a gradual increase in the retirement age to 69, deep cuts in benefits for middle-class families and an immediate impact on current retirees through a reduction in cost-of-living adjustments that would begin in 2011, according to Health Care Consumers.

Many of today's retirees are already struggling due to a loss of retirement income in the stock market and a devaluing of their homes as the housing market has declined, said Barbara Franklin, president of the Illinois Alliance for Retired Americans.

Both her organization and Health Care Consumers support an alternate deficit-reduction proposal from Schakowsky that would exceed President Barack Obama's goal of achieving a primary budget balance in 2015 and leave Medicare and Social Security benefits intact, their leaders say.

The Schakowsky plan includes, in part, cuts in defense spending, eliminating corporate tax breaks and ending Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. It would eliminate the Social Security payroll tax cap on the employer's side and raise the cap on earnings on the employee side to 90 percent.

Health Care Consumers contends proposed cuts in Medicare and Social Security in the Simpson-Bowles plan would unfairly burden middle- and lower-income people, and in effect, force lower-income Americans to work longer to support their wealthier counterparts.

And it would wind up robbing many Americans of the retirement they've earned, said the organization's Executive Director Claudia Lennhoff.

Currently, two-thirds of older Americans rely on Social Security for half their income, she said.

"We believe these programs are sacred and should not be cut in any way to reduce the deficit," said Anne Gargano Ahmed, lead organizer for the Health Care Consumers' Medicare Task Force.