[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 58 (Thursday, May 12, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: May 12, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                       TRIBUTE TO IRWIN WOLKSTEIN

                                 ______


                          HON. HENRY A. WAXMAN

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                         Thursday, May 12, 1994

  Mr. WAXMAN. Mr. Speaker, it is with sadness that I have learned of 
the recent death of Mr. Irwin Wolkstein on May 9, 1994. In a time when 
many are quick to heap criticism and scorn on civil servants, all too 
often we overlook the exemplary service of those who quietly and 
effectively work on behalf of us all. Irwin Wolkstein represented the 
very highest ideals of public service--intelligence, integrity, and 
commitment.
  Mr. Speaker, very few Americans would know that Mr. Wolkstein 
directly touched the lives of literally millions of older Americans who 
today enjoy economic security in their retirement years because of the 
Medicare program. Today, nearly 30 years after the passage of Medicare, 
many do not remember the days before Medicare, when even the most basic 
health care needs of the aged often quickly wiped out their meager 
savings and Social Security incomes on which they depended for 
survival.
  Now Medicare is an everyday part of the American landscape, but such 
was not always the case. As a senior civil servant in the 1960s, Irwin 
Wolkstein played a critical role in making Medicare a reality--not just 
an idea.
  Irv had become one of the government's leading experts on the health 
security problems of the elderly in America. Much of his early career 
had been spent at the headquarters of the Social Security 
Administration in Baltimore, where he served as head of the Agency's 
Coverage and Disability Branch. Irv was involved in studies of the 
increasingly burdensome health care needs of the elderly, and he became 
an expert on the effects of illness on the limited financial resources 
of most older Americans.
  In 1961, President Kennedy called on Congress to enact a program of 
hospital insurance, financed through a program of social insurance, to 
help meet the most significant health care costs faced by the elderly--
namely, a lengthy hospital stay. The Social Security Administration was 
called on to begin developing the details of such a program. Irv 
Wolkstein provided many of the answers about how to design such a 
program and make it work.
  Between 1961 and 1965, when Medicare was enacted, the key policy 
advisor to whom the Commissioner of Social Security, the Secretary of 
HEW, and the Congress turned on questions about the Medicare proposal 
was Irwin Wolkstein. When issues arose about the benefit design, about 
the standards that would ensure quality, or about how to administer the 
program, Irv and his staff of bright thinkers in Baltimore would get 
down to business--working nights and weekends between ongoing meetings 
of Congressional committees. Back they would come, armed with a range 
of options and a set of preferred recommendations--recommendations 
always based on approaches that could be counted on to work in the real 
world. Insiders, who saw firsthand Irv's boundless capacity to generate 
new ideas and put them to the test of political acceptability and 
practicality, often referred to him in later years as one of the true 
``fathers of the Medicare program.''
  Mr. Speaker, Irv Wolkstein was an unabashed believer that government 
could make a positive difference in the lives of people. In 1983, at a 
Congressional conference on the Future of Medicare, he said that, in 
the 1960s,

       [T]he wealth of the country was believed to be sufficient 
     to permit a share to be made available to protect the aged 
     from insecurity arising from the costs of health services. 
     Medicare's primary goal was to prevent major illness from 
     spelling financial disaster for the older people of the 
     country. The point has been made that the aged cannot be 
     protected from dependency without health insurance that 
     responds to the costs of illness as they occur * * *.

We would all be advised to keep these words in mind as we now consider 
the needs of all Americans for the health security that most of our 
older citizens now enjoy--in no small part because of the tireless 
efforts of Irwin Wolkstein.
  Mr. Speaker, I am sure that Members will join with me in expressing 
our sympathies to Irv's wife, Sylvia, his daughter and son-in-law, 
Barbara and Perry Kagen, and his grandsons, Brian Neal Kagen and David 
Ira Kagen.

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