[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 120 (Monday, July 24, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H7466-H7467]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                         SHORTFALL IN MEDICARE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of May 

[[Page H7467]]
  12, 1995, the gentlewoman from Colorado [Mrs. Schroeder] is recognized 
during morning business for 5 minutes.
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. Mr. Speaker, I probably represent the Democratic side 
and let me try and clear up this Medicare thing. Yes, we do have a 
report from the trustees of Medicare that it will have a shortfall 
starting in the year 2002.
  Let me ask a question. Here is the big difference between the sides. 
If you had a report saying there would be a shortfall in the year 2002, 
would you run out then and take another $270 billion out of this 
account? It is not going to have a surplus. It is going to have a 
shortfall. If you take $270 billion out of it, boy, oh boy, is it going 
to have a shortfall in the year 2002 because that is exactly what the 
other side of the aisle is trying to do.
  We hear all this yelling and posturing. It is because they do not 
have the facts on their side so they have got to yell louder.
  Now they are going to take the $270 billion out to give a tax cut, 
and it is basically going to be for people who make over $350,000 a 
year. They are going to get about a $20,000 a year rebate. Goody for 
them, and the people who are on Medicare are going to pay for it.
  On this side of the aisle, what the President has said is that the 
Medicare system is in trouble and he is talking about trying to cut 
down $70 billion. There is a big difference between $270 billion and 
$70 billion, but he is talking about trying to cut out waste of $70 
billion or find efficiencies of $70 billion and not fund a tax cut, but 
reinvest it in the Medicare fund. That will help make it solvent.
  If you take the money out and it is already in trouble, you only 
escalate the problems you are going to have. If you take it out of the 
trust fund and try to find efficiencies and the savings you get you put 
back in the trust fund, then you hope to make it solvent. That is what 
all of the screaming is about.
  It is really very simple. What has really happened is they do not 
want to admit what they are doing. I mean, it is embarrassing. The 
people are not stupid in this country. Thank goodness. They know there 
is a big difference between finding savings and reinvesting it in that 
trust fund, and it should be a separate trust fund because you put the 
money in separately. It did not come out of general revenues, and 
people are trying to find it as a way to do a bill payer for big tax 
cuts that this side is not supporting.
  Why do I care so much about Medicare? Because if you gut Medicare the 
way they are talking about it, the impact it is going to have on the 
American woman is very serious. Many more women than men are on 
Medicare, but not only at the Medicare level. It is going to impact 
women who are not on Medicare because women are still the primary 
caregivers in this country, and if older women suddenly find they 
cannot make a go of if because Social Security does not give them 
enough money to pay the increased costs in their health care thing, 
they are going to end up having to move back with families or rely on 
families for more care-giving or whatever, and while many men do that, 
the still highest percentage of care-giving is still done by woman.
  Let me just give some statistics that show you what kind of trouble 
women are in. I only say that everything that I put out here, if you 
are an older woman and you are an older woman of color, the situation 
is much less.
  Very, very few, in fact, only 13 percent of America's women over 65, 
receive a private pension, only 13 percent. Why? Because when they were 
in the workplace, they had marginal jobs. Most did not have benefits; 
and if they do get a pension, their pensions are at the very lowest. So 
the 13 percent who do the best still are at the lowest end of the 
pension scale because it was before affirmative action; it was before a 
lot of things, and these women had very poor-paying jobs.
  As a consequence, we have many, many women over the age of 65 relying 
solely on Social Security, solely on Social Security, and out of that, 
they have to make their Medicare payments and they have to make all the 
rest of their payments.
  Most of you know, if you are relying solely on Social Security, you 
are in big trouble. Then, if you look at the next level of what happens 
to women, women live longer than men, but because we have done a very 
poor job in the past of doing research on women's diseases, older women 
are much more apt to be incapacitated by arthritis, osteoporosis, 
frailty, many of the kinds of diseases that we do not have an answer 
for at this point. As a consequence, they need it.
  So I just think it is really time to put this all in perspective, 
that people should stop yelling, look at the facts and let us get back 
to saving Medicare rather than trying to gut Medicare.


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