[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 121 (Tuesday, July 25, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H7686-H7687]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                              {time}  2100
                WE NEED TO LOOK AT MEDICARE MORE CLOSELY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Hayworth). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentlewoman from Washington [Mrs. Smith] is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mrs. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I think that we need to talk 
more about Medicare, because I am finally beginning to have hope. I 
took the report, the task force report home, that yellow book that 
scared me so much, and I flew 7 hours with it and I read through it and 
I read each section. Surely enough, the President's trustees were 
right. Financially, it is trouble.
  I think what has been exciting to me as a newcomer here, a freshman 
in this particular year, is that solutions are coming quickly. What 
really is clear is that the people suggest and the ones coming up here 
say that we should be clearly looking at fraud and abuse, we should be 
looking at paperwork and how much there is, and that if we would do 
those two things, it would be a good beginning to fixing the system. We 
are going to protect the system.
  I have not heard one person on either side of the aisle say we are 
not going to have Medicare. It confirmed what I have been saying, which 
is I am not willing to have any person that is on Medicare now, any 
person relying on this vial program for their life, to wake up one day 
and have it gone by default, because we do nothing to preserve the 
system, or by taking it away from people we have made a commitment to.
  So what we are seeing now is people getting out the rhetoric. There 
are a few people that stand up here each day and harp that it is going 
to be gone, but they are the minority in both parties now. Most are 
saying, let's fix it, let's preserve it, let's make sure it is stronger 
and it is simpler.
  The system is too tough for me, and my background is paperwork. So if 
my background is paperwork and I cannot figure out the paper, then how 
can someone else that is trying to manage after an illness? So that is 
just an exciting thing that I am seeing happening and a great hope for 
the system.
  Mr. HOKE. Would the gentlewoman yield?
  Mrs. SMITH of Washington. I would be glad to yield.
  Mr. HOKE. Mr. Speaker, I think that it is very important that we 
remind ourselves and each other and the Speaker that one of the 
criteria that we will follow in this is that every single person who is 
currently on Medicare has an absolute guarantee from the Republican 
Conference in this House, the majority of this House, that those 
people, if they choose to stay on the Medicare Program the way that it 
is designed today, that is a choice that they will be absolutely 
guaranteed to have, and that nobody, at least on this side of the 
aisle, nobody is suggesting anything other than that.
  Mrs. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I think the exciting thing 
about that is that it is like a rainbow. We have had this system that 
everyone has known for nearly 10 years was going to be in financial 
trouble, and they kind of just shoved it to the side. The system just 
sat there and got internally financially worse.
  Now what we are hearing about is something nobody talked about 
because they knew there were problems in the system, and that is choice 
for senior citizens.
  Mr. HOKE. I think you are right and I think that is what is exciting. 
The place that we can look first in terms of having hope for being able 
to solve this problem, other than the fact that I hope that as
 Americans, we all just have a general positive sense of our ability to 
meet any challenge, under any circumstance, and meet it positively and 
with vigor and with dignity and know that we are going to succeed.

  One of the places that we can look, and probably the place we ought 
to look first generally, is in the private sector. I know, as you know, 
what has happened in the private sector. We have gone from over double 
digit inflationary rates in health care down to about 4 percent in the 
past couple of years. We are running at 10.5 percent in the public 
sector inflation per year, at 4 percent in the private sector. Clearly, 
if we simply use that as our model, right there, that is actually less 
than the increase that we have budgeted in Medicare over the next 7 
years.
  Mrs. SMITH of Washington. What the gentleman from Ohio is saying, is 
let's look at what worked in the general medical to bring down the 
inflation rate for Medicare. You know what they did? They streamlined 
paperwork, they got rid of fraud, they dealt with giving individuals 
choice.

[[Page H 7687]]

  We need to bring all of those things in. But we have to secure the 
confidence of those that are on it now and make sure everyone out there 
knows, or everyone knows, whether it is my grandmom or my mother-in-
law, that they know that tomorrow they are going to still be taken care 
of. I hope the rhetoric goes down, because we have to fix this. With 
the rhetoric, that could stop us from fixing it.

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