[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 10]
[House]
[Pages 13347-13348]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




         REPUBLICANS' BID TO PRIVATIZE MEDICARE WILL DEGRADE IT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, Members may have read in this 
morning's Roll Call about the personal videotape President Bush sent 
urging Republicans to seize the moment and overhaul Medicare. Even 
though privatization will increase costs and degrade the quality of 
coverage that seniors receive, the President unapologetically is 
promoting Medicare privatization.
  Medicare is enduringly popular with most Americans, including Main 
Street Republicans; but Medicare is a thorn in the side of conservative 
extremists. They call it Big Government.
  For the majority of Americans who value Medicare, the problem is that 
those same extremists are now in power. They are using tactics familiar 
to anyone who has followed the history of another public program, 
Federal Rail Service. For years, conservative ideologues in office have 
underfunded Amtrak, the passenger rail system. As train service 
declines, conservatives insist that Amtrak deserves less funding. Even 
though every nation in the world subsidizes its public transportation, 
Congress inadequately invests in and dutifully undermines our national 
rail system.
  In their unrelenting 20-year-old effort to privatize Medicare, begun 
during the salad days of the Reagan administration, the far right has 
honed the Amtrak strategy to a science: underfund Medicare; make it 
more inflexible and bureaucratic; cut basic consumer service functions; 
lure, then coerce, seniors into private insurance; set this popular 
program up for failure; then blame any failures on the fact that it is 
a public program.
  When Medicare was enacted in 1965, only 22 Republicans in the House 
and Senate supported it. Bob Dole, Republican Congressman, voted 
against it. Donald Rumsfeld, a Republican Congressman, voted against 
creating Medicare. Gerald Ford, a Republican Congressman then, voted 
against creating Medicare. Senator Strom Thurman, a Republican Senator 
then, voted against creating Medicare.
  Then in 1995, when the GOP majority had its first chance to reform 
Medicare, Speaker Gingrich, predicting that Medicare would wither on 
the vine, attempted to cut $270 billion from Medicare to make room, get 
this, for several hundred billion dollars of tax cuts. Sound familiar?
  Then came Mediscare. This GOP campaign, launched in the late 1990s, 
aimed to convince Americans that Medicare is going broke and the only 
way to save Medicare is to turn it over to private investors. Medicare, 
they

[[Page 13348]]

call it Mediscare, Medicare is no more at risk of going broke than is 
the Defense Department. They are both funded with public dollars.
  Forcing Medicare beneficiaries into private insurance plans will not 
reduce Federal outlays. Per capita spending on Medicare is lower than 
that on private health insurance, and has been lower than the supposed 
``efficient'' private health service for 30 years. But the push to 
privatize Medicare has never been grounded in facts; it is an 
ideological campaign, pure and simple.
  Republican leadership simply does not like Medicare. The idea of 
luring seniors into private health plans grew out of the 
Medicare+Choice experiment. The +Choice debacle started out innocently 
enough. The theory was HMOs could operate much more efficiently than 
traditional Medicare, so they could provide both basic and enhanced 
benefits for less than the traditional Medicare plan.
  It did not work out that way. By selectively enrolling the healthiest 
seniors, HMOs earned a windfall on the taxpayers' dime. Eventually, 
that windfall was outstripped by the cost of providing extra benefits. 
HMOs turned around and asked Congress for more money. The Republican 
Congress then poured more money into these private managed-care plans, 
which never covered more than one-sixth of the population, leaving less 
for the 86 percent of seniors who are enrolled in traditional Medicare.
  In other words, Republicans invest more in seniors who agree to join 
private plans than in six-sevenths of the people in the Medicare plan 
who stay in traditional Medicare.
  President Bush has embraced the Amtrak strategy with even more 
abandon than his predecessors. Get this: he has proposed establishing a 
new Medicare prescription drug benefit, but only for seniors who agree 
to leave traditional Medicare and join private HMO insurance programs. 
While promoting additional dollars for HMOs, President Bush has taken 
steps to cut Medicare's already-meager operating funds, to curtail its 
consumer service functions, and to restrict coverage for medical 
breakthroughs.
  Then Republican leaders in this and the other body dutifully berate 
Medicare for being inefficient, for being unresponsive, and for being 
too slow to adapt to 21st century medicine. The Republicans should be 
ashamed. Medicare has withstood a 30-year Republican effort to 
dismantle it, but this President is pulling out all the stops. He is 
preaching Medicare insolvency, he is engaging in Mediscare tactics, he 
is selling private plans, he is undercutting traditional Medicare, and 
he is managing traditional Medicare into the ground.

                              {time}  1945

  Before the Bush administration privatization train leaves the 
station, American seniors and those who care about them need to blow 
the whistle.

                          ____________________