[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 160 (Wednesday, December 12, 2012)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7978-S7979]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

      By Mr. CORKER:
  S. 3673. A bill to provide a comprehensive deficit reduction plan, 
and for other purposes; to the Committee on Finance.
  Mr. CORKER. Mr. President, I am here to introduce a bill that would 
address entitlement reforms and the debt ceiling called the Dollar for 
Dollar Act. I continue to hope Speaker Boehner and President Obama will 
negotiate a deal north of $4 trillion before year end. However, I think 
we should also prepare now for the possibility that they will not, 
especially based on recent conversations. The next opportunity we have 
to make the structural, transformative reforms to Social Security, 
Medicare, and Medicaid that will save these programs and put our 
country on a path to fiscal solvency will be during the debt ceiling 
vote which will come up after the first of the year as soon as we get 
back.
  I am introducing the Dollar for Dollar legislation that will raise 
the debt ceiling by roughly $1 trillion in exchange for roughly $1 
trillion in reforms to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. This 
puts into legislative language many of the concepts laid out in a 
bipartisan Simpson-Bowles and Domenici-Rivlin proposal. This meets our 
obligations to older and younger Americans.
  Young Americans expect us to solve their fiscal issues so they are 
not saddled with debt and robbed of opportunity for the American dream. 
Seniors expect us to honor the commitments we have made to them. If we 
act now, we will be addressing the debt ceiling more than 3 months 
before we reach it.
  Let me walk through those changes that are well known to policymakers 
and Congress and the administration. I will begin with Medicare. 
Medicare's trust fund has $27 trillion in unfunded liabilities, and it 
is expected to be insolvent by the year 2024. According to an Urban 
Institute study, an average income of a married family will contribute 
about $119,000 in payroll taxes to Medicare in today's dollars over 
their lifetime and consume about $357,000 in today's dollars in 
Medicare benefits. Obviously, this is unsustainable. Everybody in this 
room knows this. The pages in front of me know it. Medicare needs to be 
structured in a way to provide care for current and future 
beneficiaries in a fiscally responsible manner.

  This bill would structurally transform Medicare, keeping fee-for-
service Medicare in place forever, while having it compete side-by-side 
with a reformed Medicare Advantage program called Medicare Total 
Health. Seniors would maintain the option of choosing fee-for-service 
Medicare or a private plan as they do today. I think most of us know 
that about 25 percent of the people in our country who are on Medicare 
are in a private plan today.
  The competition created by these reforms would significantly reduce 
Medicare costs by $290 billion--and this is very important--without a 
spending cap on the program. This proposal is similar to one backed by 
Alice Rivlin, former Budget Director for Bill Clinton.
  In addition, this bill would update cost-sharing requirements to 
reflect 21st-century health care practices, such as capping out-of-
pocket expenditures for beneficiaries and unifying deductibles and 
coinsurance structures. This bill also would improve solvency by 
requiring higher income beneficiaries to pay more for their premiums.
  Finally, it would raise the eligibility age incrementally from 65 to 
67 by the year 2027. Moving to Medicaid, the bill would provide 
increased flexibility for States to achieve Medicaid savings by 
establishing a waiver process for States to better manage their 
Medicaid programs. It also would eliminate a massive ``bed tax'' 
gimmick used to bilk Federal taxpayers out of $50 billion over a 10-
year period.
  Next, let me walk through Social Security changes. Although some have 
suggested we should ignore the impending crisis in Social Security 
funding, we should address it now because it is already beginning to 
cause the Federal Government to spend more than it takes in, and the 
Social Security trust fund is projected to be exhausted in the year 
2033. It also will be much more painful to make these adjustments to 
achieve solvency in Social Security if we procrastinate.
  In order to return the program to long-term solvency, the bill would 
enhance the progressivity of benefit calculations. In addition, it 
would adopt chained CPI in measuring inflation to calculate annual 
cost-of-living adjustments. Chained CPI is the Bureau of Labor 
Statistics most modern and most accurate measure of inflation. By the 
way, the bill would apply chained CPI government-wide, which would also 
affect revenues, and it would reflect revenues in a positive way as it 
relates to our budget deficits. It would slowly raise the retirement 
age to better reflect longevity increases.
  Finally, the bill would strengthen the disability insurance program 
by moving beneficiaries into Social Security insurance at an earlier 
age. This part of Social Security will go bankrupt by the year 2017 if 
we do nothing.
  In conclusion, I am offering a bill that would implement structural 
entitlement reforms and, in exchange, it would raise the debt ceiling 
dollar for dollar. Dealing with this now would avoid facing a crisis 
next year when we hit that debt ceiling in February or March, which 
would rattle financial markets and generate tremendous uncertainty in 
our country and around the world. We need to get our fiscal problems 
behind us so that businesses, investors, and all of the American people 
can have confidence about the future. If we do that, the economy will 
truly take off.
  So if I could, if one of the pages could take this to the desk, I am 
introducing this bill. I hope Senator Reid will put in place a process 
through regular order for bills of this nature to be introduced and go 
through the appropriate committees. I hope when we deal with the debt 
ceiling in this coming year, we do so on a dollar-for-dollar basis, 
just as has been recently established this last year--the precedent has 
been set--that during this fiscal dilemma we are dealing with, when we 
raise the debt ceiling, we actually lower spending by a dollar. Up 
until this point, almost all the things we have talked about have been 
through discretionary spending. Thus far, we really haven't addressed 
entitlement reforms.
  Again, let me reiterate that I hope the President and Speaker Boehner 
come to some accommodation over the next couple of weeks that actually 
deals with some maybe $4 trillion in size that would actually put this 
in the rearview mirror. But as the conversations continue, and not much 
substance is coming forward, that is looking doubtful. So I hope as we 
end this year and move into next year we will begin to put in place an 
open process whereas we move toward the debt ceiling and use the same 
precedent we have already used this last year, so that when we raise 
the debt ceiling by a dollar, we will reduce spending by a dollar.
  We have all said we need revenues and we need entitlement reform. 
What I have done today is to lay out a way--and I know other Senators 
will have ideas, and I hope they will bring them to the floor--for us 
to raise the debt

[[Page S7979]]

ceiling by around $1 trillion and in return have entitlement reform on 
a dollar-for-dollar basis, saving and reforming these programs, so that 
seniors in the future certainly will have the opportunity to continue 
these programs they depend upon so much, and the young people who are 
coming behind us will have the certainty that we, as mature adults, I 
hope, have dealt with these issues in an appropriate way.
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