[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 183 (Friday, November 17, 1995)]
[House]
[Page H13279]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Pallone] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I just want to address some of the issues 
that were raised by the previous speaker.
  First of all, with regard to the government shutdown and with regard 
to what some of the freshman Democrats have said, I am very much in 
favor of their position. I think that we should stay here. We should 
not be going out of session. We should stay here through Sunday, 
obviously, in order to see what we can do to work out an agreement so 
that the Government does not have to continue to be shut down or slowed 
down as it is right now. I have a lot of Government employees in my 
district, and I think that is the only right thing for us to do.
  The other thing I wanted to mention with regard to the previous 
speaker is, I do not really think the issue here is a balanced budget 
because most of the Members in this body on both sides of the aisle 
feel that we should have a balanced budget. Obviously the President 
feels that we should have a balanced budget. But what is happening here 
is that Speaker Gingrich and the Republican leadership are essentially 
holding the government hostage to their view or their ideology with 
regard to a particular type of balanced budget.

                              {time}  2130

  Mr. Speaker, that is not fair, and that is certainly not what has 
happened here in the past. That is the major difference, if you will, 
about what is happening in Washington right now as opposed to previous 
years. In previous years, when there were disagreements about the 
budget between the two parties or between the President and the 
Congress, they allowed the Government to continue, they allowed 
operations to continue, so Americans were not hurt in any way while 
they argued over their differences about the budget. That should be 
allowed to occur here now, that is what President Clinton has been 
saying, that is what most of the Democrats are saying, but that is not 
what happens because basically Speaker Gingrich wants to hold the 
Government shut down, if you will, hostage to his particular ideology 
about the budget. It is not fair.
  I wanted to speak a little bit, if I could, about this, about this 
budget that was considered today which I was very much opposed to. What 
I would like to say basically is that the budget that was adopted today 
and which I did not support, essentially what it does is it takes a 
huge amount of money from the Medicare Program, from the Medicaid 
Program, and essentially hurts seniors and those people on low incomes 
who receive Medicaid right now, and it cuts those programs and really 
hurts the people that take advantage of those programs in order to 
provide these hefty tax breaks primarily for the wealthy. If we were to 
eliminate the tax breaks for the wealthy, we would not have to cut 
Medicare or Medicaid as much as is being proposed, and at the same 
time, and even worse, we are asking seniors to even pay more for 
essentially less health care coverage.
  I just like to give some examples of how this plays out in a little 
more detail, if I could, in the time that I have left. First of all, we 
have information that shows that the average tax cut for those in the 
top 1 percent of taxpayers who get a tax cut would be about $15,000, 
but for 99.7 percent of all taxpayers in the bottom fifth, they would 
actually have a tax increase or see no change at all. For those in this 
group who have a tax increase, their taxes would go up by an average of 
$173 a year, so this is only a tax cut for wealthy Americans, it is 
actually a tax increase for a lot of the taxpayers at the bottommost 
part who are also working and paying taxes.

  With regard to the Medicare Program, because you are taking so much 
out of the Medicare Program, what essentially happens is that the 
reimbursement rate to hospitals, to doctors, to health care providers, 
becomes so much lower in overall terms that it causes them to cut back. 
Hospitals will close, particularly in my home State, because so many of 
them are Medicare and Medicaid dependents. A lot of doctors just will 
not take Medicare any more because of the reimbursement rates, and even 
more importantly, what they do with the Medicare Program, what the 
Republican budget does with the Medicare program, is that it changes 
the emphasis on the dollars towards HMO's and managed care and against 
the traditional fee-for-service system where the senior had the 
opportunity to go and choose their own doctor. It does that in a very 
insidious way, by saying that the growth that is allowed, if you will, 
in funding is more in the HMO or managed care side and less on the 
traditional fee-for-service side where you choose your own doctor, and 
then, even worse, if you look at this conference agreement on the 
budget, it says that if they cannot save the $270 billion in cuts that 
are proposed in what they propose by moving so many seniors into 
managed care, then what they do is they have what they call a fail-safe 
mechanism that basically makes even more cuts again in the traditional 
fee-for-service system. So what you are going to have is a lot of 
seniors that cannot find a doctor of their choice.

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