[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 19 (Tuesday, January 31, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H894-H895]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                THE REPUBLICAN LEADERSHIP AND NEWTSPEAK

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 4, 1995, the gentleman from California [Mr. Stark] is 
recognized during morning business for 3 minutes.
  Mr. STARK. Mr. Speaker, we obviously have entered the world of 
``Newtspeak.'' Unlike some of my colleagues, I do not have lapses in 
how to pronounce important messages.
   [[Page H895]] But the Speaker of the House has decided to drag the 
Medicare system into the world of Newtspeak and is suggesting a program 
that would rethink Medicare from the ground up.
  If I were going to cut $200 billion out of Medicare I would have to 
rethink it from the ground up too because I would have destroyed it, 
and that is exactly what the Speaker suggested in a speech over the 
weekend. He said that Medicare is the opposite of how America works. 
And I suspect that is true, if you are a Republican American.
  America does not work by having Golden Rule Insurance Co., be 1 of 
the 10 largest donors to GOPAC and then have the whole structure of the 
American Congress in its first 100 days deciding to revise the Medicare 
system for the convenience of certain insurance companies.
  I would like to bring the discussion of Medicare back to earth 
because it is the finest system in the United States. It has less than 
a 3-percent overhead.
  And the Speaker, in his speech, suggested we ought to give American 
seniors more choice. There is no program in the United States that 
gives its beneficiaries more choice than Medicare. If you are Medicare 
beneficiary you can go to any physician or any hospital in the United 
States if you can walk, ride, hitchhike, or have the bus fare to get 
there.
  And there are hundreds of managed care plans which are available to 
Medicare beneficiaries. As we speak today there are three or four dozen 
applications for new Medicare managed care programs to be opened to 
seniors. There is no insurance policy in the country that gives greater 
choice.
  Why are we discussing at this point the idea of turning Medicare into 
a voucher program? I submit it is political payback time, and it is a 
way to finance 200 or 300 billion dollars' worth of the cuts.
  The first hearing we had in the Committee on Ways and Means was a 
proposal on the first day of Congress to take $70 billion out of the 
Medicare Trust Fund. For what purpose? To finance tax cuts for the very 
2 or 3 percent of the richest Americans in our country.
  This is Newtspeak. This is not how America operates, giving money to 
the rich, and taking it out of the trust fund that supports a medical 
care delivery system for the most fragile, needy people in the United 
States.
  Ladies and gentleman, Medicare is one of the wonders of our 
Government. Maybe many things do not work well and maybe many things 
are not efficient, but understand we have fewer than 4,500 bureaucrats 
serving 5 million people, and there is no insurance company in the 
country that comes close to that efficiency.


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