[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
[March 30, 2000]
[Pages 574-577]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]


[[Page 574]]


Remarks at the Selfhelp Austin Street Senior Center in New York City
March 30, 2000

    Thank you so much. Well, Linda, based on 
your speech here, I would say you have a good chance to succeed your 
mother as an effective senior politician--[laughter]--when your time 
comes. Didn't she do a good job? I thought she was great.
    I want to thank you and your 
mother and your family for being here. 
Congressman Anthony Weiner, thank you for 
welcoming me to your district, and for the truly outstanding leadership 
that you have provided to your constituents and to this country. You 
should be very proud of him. He's done a great job in Washington, DC.
    I want to thank Richard Aronson, the CEO 
of Selfhelp Community Services, for what you do, and for the whole self-
help movement, which I believe so strongly in. I'd like to thank Rabbi 
Skolnik of the Forest Hill Jewish Center 
for hosting the Selfhelp Austin Street Senior Center. I want to thank my 
long-time friend, your borough president, Claire Schulman, and all the people from Queens, the officials who are 
here. Thank you for coming.
    I have brought a number of people from the White House. There's a 
big crowd here. But I brought two people I want to acknowledge. First of 
all, Tom Freedman, who works with me in the 
White House, because he's an old friend of Congressman Weiner's, and he lived with him. And whenever the 
Congressman gets a little too pushy with me, I remind him that I know 
things about his lost youth. [Laughter] So I thank Tom for coming--
although I must say, that crack about the busy life of a political 
spouse is one of the best jokes I've heard on me in a long time. 
[Laughter] I loved that.
    And I want to recognize one person who has played a major role for 8 
years now in the economic success of this administration. I think, 
clearly, the most knowledgeable Director of the Office of Management and 
Budget, member of the President's Cabinet, in the history of that 
office, a man who got his bar mitzvah in the synagogue upstairs and who 
had the party here in this very room, Mr. Jack Lew, who's here with me today. Thank you, Jack, wherever you 
are. Stand up, Jack. When he told me he got his bar mitzvah here, I 
asked if he were prepared to go through the exercise again today. 
[Laughter] And he said his head was too crowded with my budget numbers.
    Let me say to all of you, I am profoundly honored to be here and to 
be in the presence of Americans who have served our country in so many 
profoundly important ways. Many of you, well into retirement, continue 
to serve today, providing the volunteer power that runs this center and 
doing other things of immense value to your community. Your energy and 
your experience are a precious natural resource. They are part of the 
answer to how we are going to deal with the challenge of Americans 
living longer lives, to ensure that those lives will also be better and 
more fulfilling lives.
    But there's another thing that I worry about all the time, that you 
just heard so eloquently discussed by Linda Nadel. I am the oldest of the baby boomers; I was born in 
1946. The generation between--of people born between 1946 and 1964 is 
loosely known as the baby boom generation. We were, until 2 years ago, 
the largest number of children ever to go through the public schools of 
America. Only now, for the last 2 years, have we had a larger number of 
children in our schools.
    When we retire, there will only be, at present rates of childbirth 
and immigration, about two people working for every one person drawing 
Social Security. And I can tell you, I grew up in a medium-sized 
community where most of my friends were just middle class working 
people, and most of my childhood friends whom I still know today are 
middle class working people. And they all worry very much about whether 
our society is prepared for the retirement of the baby boom generation. 
And all of us who are parents are worried to death that our retirement 
might somehow burden our children and their abilities to raise our 
grandchildren.
    So I came today to talk to you about the challenges that American 
seniors face today--one of which has already been discussed by 
Congressman Weiner, which is the challenge 
of prescription drugs and the fact that it's not covered by Medicare 
today--and the challenges that America will face when we have even more 
seniors in the future.

[[Page 575]]

    Social Security and Medicare are the foundation of our commitment to 
seniors and to millions of Americans with disabilities. Fiscal 
responsibility has been the foundation of my answer to the challenge of 
the baby boomers' retirement.
    Seven years ago, when I became President, we had a $290 billion 
deficit, our national debt had quadrupled in 12 years, and Medicare was 
predicted to run out of money in 1999, last year. We had to make some 
tough choices. Vice President Gore and I presented the budget to the 
Congress, and he cast the tie-breaking vote 
in the Senate--one of his good jokes, Congressman, is that whenever Al 
Gore votes, we win, because he only gets to vote when the vote is tied--
[laughter]--and the first budget passed by a single vote in the House.
    But it began to turn the country around. We got the deficit coming 
down. We got interest rates coming down. We got the economy growing 
again. And now, we've been able to have balanced budgets and surpluses, 
doubling our investment in education, and still providing needed tax 
relief to working families.
    This strategy was very controversial when we first started it, but 
it's not so controversial anymore. We've had the first balanced budgets 
back to back in 42 years, the longest economic expansion in history, the 
lowest unemployment rate in 30 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 30 
years, the lowest poverty rates in 20 years, the lowest crime rates in 
25 years, and 21 million new jobs. If we keep going, we'll be able to 
make our country debt-free in the next dozen years, for the first time 
since 1835.
    Now, I want to focus, though, on the specific challenges you face 
and the specific challenges that we baby boomers face as we move into 
our senior years. What does all this mean?
    On that score, remember, again, when I took office, I got a report 
that said the Medicare Trust Fund was going to be broke in 1999, last 
year. But the strong economy has helped. So have a lot of the Medicare 
reforms and a lot of our antifraud measures. And Medicare and Social 
Security are now on a path to a sound future. Today the Social Security 
and Medicare trustees issued the report they issue every year at this 
time on the financial health of these two vital programs. But the first 
thing I'd like to do is to tell you what kind of shape they're in.
    The Social Security trustees announced that the economy has now 
added 3 years to the expected life of the Social Security Trust Fund. It 
is now solvent until 2037 with the present situation.
    The Medicare trustees told us that Medicare is in the best shape in 
a quarter century, better managed, more efficient, and now solvent until 
2023, 24 years longer than the solvency on the day I took office. And I 
am very pleased by that. This means that the commitment to fiscal 
discipline and good Government can make a difference in the lives of 
families, not only here in Queens but all across our country.
    Let me just give you a couple of other examples. Just a decade ago, 
Medicare premiums were increasing at double-digit rates every single 
year. Today, with better management and with a strong economy, we've 
been able to slow the rate of growth dramatically, producing a savings 
of more than $200 a year in the premiums for a couple over 65.
    We're also enabling seniors who are willing and able to work, to do 
so without losing their Social Security benefit. Last year I asked 
Congress to work with me to allow our seniors to work without being 
penalized, and both Houses have now passed that legislation to eliminate 
the Social Security earnings caps for seniors.
    Now, that's the good news. But let me say to all of you: While the 
trustees reports showed that Social Security and Medicare are secure 
today, we must stay focused on the challenges of the future. In 30 
years, the number of Americans on Medicare, the number of Americans over 
65, will double. I hope to be one of them. But they will double.
    Now, let's face it. This is a high-class problem. This is the kind 
of problem we have because we're living longer and better lives because 
of the miracles of modern medicine, because of the miracles of basic 
public health, because we're taking better care of ourselves, and that's 
all very, very good. But we have to prepare for it. And we have to be 
ready for the challenges we know ahead. We want all seniors to have 
access to state-of-the-art medical care. We want all Americans to be 
able to live out their lives in comfort and dignity, without fear of 
being a burden to their families.
    I'd like to just mention one of the families here with us today: 
Wichna Szmulewicz and her husband 
Szymon are Holocaust survivors. Szymon has 
Parkinson's disease. Wichna takes

[[Page 576]]

care of him. Their prescription drug costs take almost 20 percent of 
their annual income. This is not right. Wichna does not want a handout, 
but she doesn't want to be burden to her grown children, and she does 
need some help. That's what our proposal, that Congressman Weiner and 
the other members of our caucus support, to provide a voluntary 
prescription drug benefit in Medicare, is all about.
    I think we ought to do our part to help these folks and people like 
them in this room, in this community, and all over this country. We 
should not consume our surpluses with big, risky tax cuts until we have 
first used the surplus to strengthen Social Security and take it out 
beyond the life of the baby boom generation, to strengthen and modernize 
Medicare, and to invest in our children's future through education, 
science and technology, and medical research. And we ought to pay this 
national debt off. I was so pleased to hear you clapping for that. That 
means we'll have another generation of prosperity with lower interest 
rates, more growth, higher incomes, and more jobs.
    So I have asked the Congress to use every dollar of our Social 
Security surplus to pay down the debt and use the interest savings from 
it to extend the life of the Social Security Trust Fund. If we just took 
the interest savings we'll get from paying down the debt with the Social 
Security taxes you are paying and we put that interest saving into the 
Social Security Trust Fund, we could extend the life of Social Security 
to 2054, beyond the life of the baby boom generation.
    It's a simple bill. We're for it. The President is for it. The Vice 
President is for it. The 
Congressman is for it. The Democratic 
candidate for Senator from New York 
is darn sure for it. [Laughter] And if we can just get a little help 
from our friends on the other side of the aisle, we can extend the life 
of Social Security to 2054, beyond the life of the baby boom generation, 
and no baby boomer will have to worry about being a burden to his or her 
children or grandchildren. That is a wonderful opportunity and a simple 
thing to do.
    The second thing we have is a great opportunity to strengthen and 
modernize Medicare. You know, if Lyndon Johnson were President today and 
he were starting Medicare again, he would never sign a bill that didn't 
include prescription drug coverage.
    Just think how different medicine is today than it was 35 years ago. 
Today, often the most cost-effective medical treatment, keeping people 
out of hospitals, keeping people out of surgery, lengthening life and 
quality of life, involves prescription drugs. Well, when Medicare was 
enacted, we didn't have CAT scans or MRI's. We certainly didn't have 
drugs that lowered cholesterol or fought osteoporosis. Now, not having a 
prescription drug coverage in Medicare is like paying a mechanic $4,000 
to fix an engine because you wouldn't spend $25 to get the oil changed 
and a clean filter.
    I simply propose to add a purely voluntary prescription drug benefit 
to Medicare. It will make, also, preventive drug screenings more 
affordable, will have an extra pot for people who have truly 
catastrophic costs for drugs, if they need insurance for that.
    I also want some further changes to make Medicare more efficient. 
One of the reasons we've got the life of the Fund out as far as we do is 
that we have a much, much lower error rate--in other words, things being 
done that shouldn't be done, things being paid for that shouldn't be 
paid for--than we had 7 years ago. If Congress will work with me, we can 
get this done this year.
    But I cannot tell you how important this is. More than three out of 
five seniors on Medicare in this country today do not have adequate, 
affordable prescription drug coverage. And I think it is a great 
mistake, as some have suggested, to limit this coverage to people at, 
let's say, 200 percent of the Federal poverty line. For a single widow, 
that's $16,000 year. Now, that may seem like enough to live on, unless 
you have $300 or $400 a month in medical bills, for medicine alone, and 
a lot of people do.
    So again, since this is a voluntary program, I believe we should 
make everyone on Medicare eligible to buy into it. The broader the 
participation, the more cost-effective it will be. Very often, we've got 
seniors who either don't have any medical insurance that covers 
prescription drugs, or if they do, it is very limited. And very often 
the seniors who have the least money are paying the highest prices for 
drugs of anybody in this country, and it is wrong.
    Now, we are in good shape now. The life of the Medicare Trust Fund 
is secure until 2023--I mean 23d of--whatever it is--I just forgot. 
[Laughter] What is it, Jack? Twenty-twenty-
three, I got it right. My budget would

[[Page 577]]

take it out to 2030. I would like to have a 30-year cushion there. I 
would like for people to know that it would be there for 30 years. But 
it would also provide this prescription drug coverage.
    Now I can tell you what is going to happen. Your Congressman and I are going to go back to Washington, and 
there will be people to say--oh, mostly on the other side of the 
political, I would say--``Well we know this is a hot issue, and we've 
got to do something about it. So let's just provide drug coverage for 
people up to 150 percent of the poverty line.'' It's not enough. 
Medicare was intended to benefit all seniors, to help all seniors to 
keep from being driven into poverty. And this is an insurance program.
    We would never, I will say again, we would never, ever think of 
creating a program, if we were starting all over again with Medicare 
today, that did not have a prescription drug component. You know it, and 
I know it. Since we wouldn't do that, since the program's in the best 
shape it has been in in a generation, since we have the funds to take it 
out to 30 years of life, let's add a prescription drug benefit that 
everybody in this room and everybody in this country who is eligible by 
age and who needs it can buy, to provide the kind of security in health 
care all American seniors deserve.
    I just want to say one other thing, sort of off my script, that a 
lot of you will remember, and you will identify with this. You only get 
a few chances in life as a people to do really big, good things, when 
times are going along so well and the circumstances are there, that you 
can do this. When Medicare was created, it was during what was up until 
this time the longest economic expansion in American history. And so the 
American people felt secure, and they supported their elected 
Representatives in doing things like beginning to provide national 
health to our schools and providing Medicare. Now that's the last time 
we were able to do something like this.
    Now we are in the longest economic expansion in our history. But 
these things don't go on forever. And if we can't do this now, when will 
we ever do it? If we can't do the really big, right things now, in 
Medicare, in continuing to pay our debt off, in improving the education 
of our children, in providing economic opportunity to the neighborhoods 
and the rural communities and the other places that have been left 
behind, when will we ever get around to it?
    So I want to ask all of you, whatever your political background, to 
give us some support to reform Medicare and provide this prescription 
drug benefit, to lengthen the life of Social Security to 2054, to make 
sure that the baby boomers' entire lives are a blessing to this country 
and not a burden to our children and grandchildren, and to immediately 
provide the seniors of today the prescription drug coverage that so many 
millions of them need.
    This is an honorable and a good thing to do, but it is a solemn 
obligation, and we will never have a better chance to do it. And 
therefore, we have a solemn responsibility to get the job done.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 3:01 p.m. in the Crystal Room at the senior 
center in the Borough of Queens. In his remarks, he referred to Linda 
Nadel, office manager, Services Now for Adult Persons Senior Center, who 
introduced the President, and her mother, Ruth Freidman, lobbyist for 
senior issues; and Rabbi Gerald C. Skolnik, Forest Hill Jewish Center.