```

[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 72 (Wednesday, May 3, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H4527-H4528]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

                              {time}  1215
                        MEDICARE AND THE BUDGET

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Regula). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from California [Mr. Miller] is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mr. MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, many of our colleagues on this 
side of the aisle have raised the question about exactly what is going 
on with the Republican budget process where we are now a month late in 
meeting the deadline, a deadline that we have not missed over the last 
4 years.
  I guess the answer is in the daily press. That is, that the 
Republican leadership is having a terrible time with now trying to 
figure out how to connect all of the dots in what they have promised in 
their budget to the American public. That is, that they would provide a 
huge tax cut to the wealthiest people in this Nation, they would 
balance the budget, they would add money to the military, and they 
would not touch Social Security.
  Of course, what we now find out is that they cannot meet those 
targets without touching Social Security, and they plan to do more than 
just touch Social Security. The speculation runs from cuts of somewhere 
around $200 billion over the next 7 years to Senators estimating as 
high as $400 billion. What that means, if you just take an average, if 
you just save $250 billion, you are talking over that 7-year period of 
asking senior citizens to pay somewhere between $3,000 and $3,700 more 
for their health care.
  The problem is that many, many of these senior citizens simply have 
no way to replace that income. They have no way to replace the money 
that they would have to pay out for the additional cost of Medicare. 
They have no ability to go back to work. They cannot get a job. They 
cannot lean on their children any harder. So those cuts are immediately 
translated to the declining assets and the financial well-being of the 
senior citizens.
  The Republican leadership has run around the last couple of days 
trying to explain that this is really about their saving Medicare, this 
is about reforming Medicare. But it is interesting, as each objective 
observer who has looked at this says that this continues to translate 
into cuts to Medicare that must be made up by the beneficiaries of that 
plan, the senior citizens of this country, the $3,000 that I just 
talked about.
  It is also interesting to note that when you get into a discussion of 
rural hospitals, we find out that there are 10 million Medicare 
beneficiaries who live in rural America, where often there is only a 
single hospital available to service that population and the rest of 
the community, and that these kinds of cuts, the hospital association 
tells us, translate into a serious threat of these hospitals closing, 
and not only the senior citizens losing access to that hospital but the 
entire community losing access to that hospital.
  We also know that these rural residents very often are more likely 
than urban residents to be uninsured. So the ability to offset these 
cuts would then be shifted in rural areas, perhaps to those who have 
less access to insurance.
  It is interesting also to note that the plan of just cutting across 
the board in Medicare is resisted by the National Association of 
Manufacturers, companies like Eastman Kodak that say if you do that, 
once again you are taking 
[[Page H4528]] the cost of Medicare and you are shifting it onto the 
backs of working people who are already paying very substantial 
premiums for current Medicare recipients and for their future cost.
  This kind of leads you to what happened yesterday when Senator Dole 
and Speaker Gingrich called a news conference to explain all this, and 
as they found that they could not explain it to the press, they finally 
just simply walked out of the news conference. They just walked off 
stage.
  They called the news conference, they said, ``We want the news 
conference to explain to the American people how we are saving 
Medicare,'' and when they got into the news conference a few minutes, 
they found out that they could not explain it because the numbers do 
not add up. They cannot protect Social Security under their plan or 
they cannot protect the balanced budget under their plan or they cannot 
protect the tax cut under their plan. So they simply in a huff walked 
out of the room and said they would get back to everyone later.
  That is what the fear is about in the country today, is that they 
will get back to us later. I guess the new date for the budget is on 
May 17, and at that point then we will, I guess, be able to unravel the 
puzzle here on how they are going to meet the goal of the balanced 
budget which almost everybody in the country believes should happen, 
the goal of the tax cut which most of the country thinks is kind of a 
luxury when you are running a deficit of $250 to $300 billion a year, a 
$4 trillion national debt, to now borrow money to give people a tax cut 
or borrow money from the Social Security recipients to give the people 
a tax cut.
  This just no longer makes any kind of economic sense, and looks very 
bad both for the deficit, for Social Security recipients, and 
eventually for low-income people who rely on the programs that have 
already been cut.
  I will be happy to yield to the gentlewoman from California.
  Ms. PELOSI. I thank the gentleman for yielding.
  I wanted to focus on one point you had made about the Republicans 
saying they would not touch Social Security, but what these Medicare 
cuts will do. It would reduce half of the Social Security cost-of-
living adjustment for millions and millions of our senior citizens. In 
fact, 2 million Medicare beneficiaries will have all or most of their 
cost of living adjustments consumed by the Republican beneficiary cost 
increases.
  Mr. MILLER of California. So in fact what you are saying is when they 
get a COLA increase, the vast amount of that COLA will simply be 
absorbed in additional Medicare costs to the Social Security recipient?
  Ms. PELOSI. Yes. It is a back door way of cutting Social Security.
  

                          ____________________
```