[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 146 (Tuesday, September 19, 1995)]
[House]
[Page H9138]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   PRESERVING AND PROTECTING MEDICARE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of May 
12, 1995, the gentleman from Kansas [Mr. Tiahrt] is recognized during 
morning business for 5 minutes.
  Mr. TIAHRT. Mr. Speaker, I wanted to spend a few minutes this morning 
talking about a very important issue of preserving and protecting 
Medicare. I want to quote from the Los Angeles Times who printed just a 
week ago, ``the House GOP plan to save Medicare is a sensible start 
toward fixing a program whose costs are out of control.'' The Democrats 
are wrong to balk at the restraining of soaring costs of the popular 
Medicare Program. The current path doubles the program's budget every 7 
years. It is not sustainable and they know it.
  Mr. Speaker, I am not an expert on Medicare, and so I went back into 
my district during the August district work period and I got together 
33 members of the health care industry, of people who were concerned 
about preserving and protecting Medicare, of people who were involved 
in taxpayer groups, the AARP, United Seniors Associates, and we got 
together and we met all morning at Wichita State University about what 
problems we were facing with Medicare and how we could best preserve 
and protect it, and today I have with me a copy of the draft report 
that we submitted and that I also used to testify before members of the 
Committee on Commerce; it is the subcommittee for the Committee on Ways 
and Means, in coming up with some solutions for preserving and 
protecting Medicare.
  Some of the ideas that we had that came out of the Fourth District of 
Kansas are now being implemented into the legislation. These members of 
this task force came to this meeting with three methods of preserving 
and protecting Medicare. We went around the room and we discussed each 
one of these solutions in depth.
  Mr. Speaker, I was expecting them to come scared because a lot of the 
rhetoric that has been said right here on the floor of the House, a lot 
that has been printed across through the elite media, and so I was 
somewhat anxious about the meeting, but when I got there, the people of 
America were not scared about losing Medicare. They were concerned, but 
they came with excellent ideas. They wanted to give the best ideas of 
Kansas to have them brought here, and some of the ideas came right out 
of the work force.
  A gentleman named Zim Zimmerman, who works for Evcon industries in 
Wichita, KS, one of the leading air-conditioner suppliers across the 
Nation. He was just 90 days away from retirement and he said, if I 
could just take my health care insurance as provided at Evcon and carry 
it on into retirement, I would be completely satisfied. Other seniors 
wanted to have the same system that is available to them now, Medicare. 
Some wanted a type of system that is a managed care system because it 
provided more alternatives to them, and some wanted medical savings 
accounts.
  Mr. Speaker, the legislation that is currently being drafted does 
keep our Nation's commitment to Medicare and it remains as an option to 
seniors, with no increase to copayments or deductibles. We also, in the 
legislation that we are right now pushing forward, allowing seniors the 
same health care choices that are available to others like Zim 
Zimmerman and other seniors in the Fourth District, and we came up with 
some good ideas on how to root out waste and fraud and abuse so that we 
can maximize the health care dollars that we are spending.
  We also have in this legislation ways of placing financial 
responsibility on those who can best afford it and try to provide the 
benefits to those who are truly in need without great demands on their 
financial responsibility. We also want to set up a guaranteed solvency 
through a budgetary fail-safe provision.
  As the task force discussed some of these problems, particularly in 
waste, fraud, and abuse, it was very apparent that fear has been used 
all across the Nation. In our report that was given to us by a 
gentleman who is administering a hospital in Halstead, KS, his name is 
Jeffrey Feeney, he used to work in a Florida hospital, and a physician 
came to him and said, I would like to use a room to talk with some of 
the seniors. And he says, well, what were you going to use the room 
for? He explained that the doctor was talking to the seniors about an 
autologous blood process by which he was parlaying the fear of seniors, 
the fear of contracting AIDS or other social STD or HIV infected blood 
through the process when they had surgery. They have to use others' 
bloods, so this autologous blood process, they would take their own 
blood, he would store it for them at no cost to them, and then in the 
future, in the event they needed blood, it would be available to them.
  Many of them would never need this blood. They would never have 
surgery, but yet he was being paid by Medicare on a daily basis for 
storing this blood. So he parlayed this fear into bilking the system 
out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
  Mr. Speaker, when I think about what has happened here recently, even 
for my own parents, when people try to come in and try to use scare 
tactics, in Kansas we call that scams, and this is not Mediscam. We are 
talking about preserving and protecting Medicare.
  So, Mr. Speaker, as we submit this report and as we proceed with 
Medicare legislation, I hope that the American public will see that the 
loss of credibility for using scare tactics is more and more apparent 
and that the plans that we have forwarded as represented by the Los 
Angeles Times are going to be effective in preserving and protecting 
Medicare.

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