[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 160 (Tuesday, October 17, 1995)]
[House]
[Page H10083]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            SAVING MEDICARE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Clinger). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of May 12, 1995, the gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Pallone] is 
recognized during morning business for 5 minutes.
  Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I would also like to use my time to talk 
about Medicare. As we know, the Republican leadership plans to bring up 
their cuts in Medicare and their program that in my opinion will 
destroy the Medicare system in the bill this Thursday, without really 
any significant debate that has occurred so far.
  I think there are many aspects of this Republican Medicare plan that 
disturb me greatly, but the one thing I think that has not been 
stressed enough is how this is going to have such a negative impact on 
the quality of health care in the United States.
  There was an article last Friday in the New York Times, an op-ed by 
Mr. Melvin Connor out of Atlanta. He says essentially what these 
changes in Medicare as well as Medicaid are going to do is to create a 
third-world atmosphere, essentially, for health care in the United 
States. He calls it ``Medicare and the Third Worldization of America.''
  The reason he says this essentially is because when you take so much 
money out of the health care system, out of Medicare and out of 
Medicaid--and we are talking about $450 billion--the inevitable result 
is that the system is squeezed so much that the quality of health care 
suffers.
  Few people I think realize this. Many of us realize that our country 
has the best health care system in the world. It is not always evenly 
distributed. A lot of the poor people or the poor elderly oftentimes do 
not have the best quality care or access to that best quality care. But 
the bottom line is that the system as a whole works fairly well right 
now, and we do have the best quality care in the world.
  But what this proposal does, what the Republican proposal does, is to 
basically cap the Medicare Program and limit Medicare spending to 
specific dollar amounts in the law. These caps--and not the choice that 
the Republicans talk about, which is not going to be there--these caps 
on Medicare spending essentially yield the enormous Medicare budget 
savings that the Republicans keep talking about.
  But the problem is that the caps on spending bear no relationship 
whatsoever to the costs of health care. Instead, they were set up to 
produce the budget savings Republicans need to pay for their tax cut 
for the wealthy. When inflation and enrollment growth push Medicare 
costs beyond these arbitrary budget caps, Medicare and the elderly and 
disabled citizens that are part of the program will be at serious risk.
  Now, one of the previous speakers this morning talked about the 
trustees and said well, we have to do something to Medicare; otherwise 
it is going to go broke.
  That simply is not true. If you look at the trustees report that 
comes out this year that estimates that the program has another 7 
years, every year over the last 25 or 30 years the trustees have come 
out with a report. Sometimes they have predicted insolvency in 2 years, 
sometimes in 7, sometimes in 10.
  The bottom line is that the trustees are not saying that this kind of 
a cut, that this magnitude of a cut in the Medicare Program, is what is 
necessary in order to keep Medicare solvent. In fact, in a letter that 
I previously quoted from Robert Rubin, the Secretary of the Treasury, 
dated September 21, to the Speaker, to Speaker Gingrich, he simply 
said:

       No Member of Congress should vote for $270 billion in 
     Medicare cuts believing that reductions of this size have 
     been recommended by the Medicare trustees or that such 
     reductions are needed now to prevent an imminent funding 
     crisis. That would be factually incorrect.

  In fact, the trustees have not said that. The trustees have said that 
something like $90 billion in savings would do fine in order to keep 
the Medicare Program solvent well beyond the next 7 years.
  What we are talking about here is an effort to basically squeeze all 
this money out of the Medicare Program and provide us essentially with 
a third world health care system just in order to achieve a tax cut for 
the wealthy. If anybody doubts that, I would suggest to them that they 
look at what came out of the House Committee on Commerce, which is the 
committee that I serve on in Congress. We tried in the Committee on 
Commerce when we were marking up the Medicare bill last week to make 
the point that if you really felt that these cuts were not being 
achieved in order to give a tax break for the wealthy, then why not 
take the Medicare Program out of this budget reconciliation bill that 
we are considering in Congress right now?
  In other words, if the Republicans really believe that they are 
trying to save Medicare, rather than take this money that they are 
cutting and using it for a tax cut for the wealthy, then why do they 
need to deal with Medicare in the context of the budget? Why do they 
not give us some time, a couple weeks, a couple months, to look at the 
Medicare Program, to look at all its different aspects, and try to deal 
with it in a way that tries to come up with a better quality health 
care system, not a worse one?
  The answer is very simple. They were not willing to do that. We 
actually submitted an amendment in the Committee on Commerce to take 
the bill out of the reconciliation, and it failed along a partisan vote 
line because the Republicans are not serious. They want to use the 
money for the tax cut.

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