Date: 2011-04-15
Speaker: VAN HOLLEN (democrat)
Chamber: H

Mr. Chairman. its hard to see how someone would define saving the social safety net by ending the Medicare guarantee for seniors. by slashing Medicaid by over $750 billion. a program that disproportionately helps seniors in nursing homes and disabled individuals. Its really hard to understand how that is preserving the social safety net. It reminds me of that strange statement we once heard that you have to destroy the village in order to save it. Now. lets understand what happens under this budget to Medicare. This budget ends the Medicare guarantee for seniors. It doesnt reform Medicare. it deforms and dismantles it because it forces seniors off the Medicare program. into the private insurance market. And it does nothing. as it dumps the seniors into the private insurance market. to control the rate of increase in health care costs. Instead. it transfers to the senior all those risks and all those costs. Seniors will pay a lot more. while the insurance companies will get all their Medicare payroll taxes. Theyll get a bonanza out of this thing. but seniors will be left holding the bag. If your voucher amount. call it whatever you want. is not sufficient to pay for the increased cost. you eat it. And we saw earlier the fact that by the year 2022 seniors will have to pay more than $6.000 above what they would have had to pay under the regular Medicare program. If your doctors not on a private plan that you can afford. tough luck. This is rationing health care by income. nothing more. And I want to say something just to clear the record one more time. We keep hearing that theyre offering seniors exactly what Members of Congress get. It simply is not true. What Members of Congress get is whats called a fair share deal. I encourage my colleagues on all sides of the aisle just to look at the Federal Employees Benefit Plan. And you look in the Office of Personnel and it says: "This formula is known as the fair share formula because it will maintain a consistent level of government contributions as a percentage of program costs regardless of what plan the enrollees elect." And it says that the government contribution equals the lesser of 72 percent of the amounts OPM determines are programwide. or 75 percent. The point is Members of Congress get a fair share formula. The Republican budget does not give a fair share formula to seniors on Medicare. It just doesnt. In fact. the way it saves money is to give them an unfair deal. It unconnects the support we give to seniors from rising health care costs. Thats why seniors will end up paying so much more and more and more. because you make the savingshealth care costs are going up like this. and the support. if you want to call it support. its really not coming from the Medicare program or the Federal Government. is going like this. Thats why the seniors are having to eat those additional costs. That is what the Republican budget does. At the same time they do provide additional tax breaks for the folks at the very top. If you want to get rid of some of the junk in the Tax Code. you can support the Democratic plan. because we got rid of subsidies for the oil companies. We got rid of those perverse tax incentives to reward corporations that are shipping American jobs instead of American products overseas. So if you want to start with tax reform. vote for the Democratic plan. Those are the choices we made. not ending the Medicare guarantee.