Winnie Skinner tries to get back into the spotlight

The Altoona woman who appeared with Al Gore’s presidential campaign says she still has to pick up cans to pay for her prescription medicine. Winifred Skinner says George Bush echoed Gore’s calls for prescription-drug price cuts but didn’t follow through. Today Skinner admits she also has a job, doing light office work at the Iowa Development Center.She says she’s worked since she was 15 and is still working at 79 and wonders what retirement is all about. Winnie Skinner appeared at a news conference in Des Moines with Iowa Citizen Action Network calling on the President Bush not to make tax cuts at the expense of Medicare. Skinner says after talking with Al Gore, she accompanied his campaign for a time last fall, making her argument for lower prescription drug prices at stops across the Midwest. So has the price of her medication gone down? She says no, it’s gone up.Skinner says Republicans even asked her to join their campaign, but she declined and today she says President Bush has done nothing to cut prescription costs. Skinner reminisces about her appearances with the presidential candidate.Winnie Skinner says she wasn’t taken aback to find herself on a mobile home traveling with the Gore campaign to take her message to voters last fall.She was just mad and tired, and wanted to tell about the cost of prescription medicine. ICAN is urging voters to tell Iowa Republican Senator Grassley to vote against federal income-tax cuts that the group says would take funding away from Medicare spending.