JUNE 26, 2003

Mr. Speaker, less than two weeks ago, the House Republicans divorced themselves from the Senate bipartisan legislation and unveiled their lengthy and complicated proposal to make sweeping changes in Medicare. After taking months to develop more than three hundred pages of fine print in secret consultation with selected corporate allies, they rammed the bill through committees last week and are ramming it through the House today under a rule developed in the wee hours this morning. No hearings, no significant opportunity for public comment, no concessions – just the way the House Republican leadership wants things.

But the Republican leadership is playing with fire. Not content merely to privatize a watered-down drug benefit, this bill, H.R. 1, privatizes the entire program in seven years. As Chairman Thomas said yesterday, "[t]o those who say that [the bill] would end Medicare as we know it, our answer is: We certainly hope so . . . . Old fashioned Medicare isn’t very good." And a Republican Senate leader was quoted last month as saying that "I believe the standard benefit, the traditional Medicare program, has to be phased out," echoing Speaker Gingrich’s 1995 prediction that traditional Medicare would "wither on the vine." The list goes on. Former Majority Leader Dick Armey said, also in 1995, that Medicare was "a program I would have no part of in a free world." More recently, the Bush Administration official in charge of Medicare, Tom Scully, two months ago called Medicare an "unbelievable disaster" and a "dumb system." And, of course, I was here in 1965 to witness the overwhelming majority of Republicans vote for the motion to recommit the legislation that created Medicare.

How will seniors react when told they will be forced to pay more to see their family doctor, or accept whatever doctors and benefits a private plan chooses to give them? How will seniors react when traditional fee-for-service Medicare is no longer a trusted safety net? How will seniors react when given a voucher and told to fend for themselves in the insurance marketplace – the same marketplace that failed them before Medicare? They should, and will, be outraged.

Seniors will also be angry when they learn that the Republican drug benefit helps insurance companies more than them. Democrats propose a true benefit provided under Medicare, with set premiums and benefits. Republicans propose payments to insurers to offer uncertain benefits, with uncertain premiums. The only certainty in the Republican plan is a huge coverage gap, when seniors will continue to pay premiums after substantial out-of-pocket expenses, and yet receive no benefit. And drug costs will continue to rise, because the Republicans prevent bargaining by Medicare to make prescription drugs more affordable to seniors.

Other nasty surprises will hurt seniors as well. Cuts in payments to hospitals, when many are closing down. Inadequate payments to doctors, when seniors’ access already is jeopardized. Increasing seniors’ costs by $8.3 billion for their Part B coverage. These are shortsighted acts of extraordinary callousness.

I urge my colleagues to reject this dangerous Republican plan. Our senior citizens deserve better than to be guinea pigs for risky ideological experimentation.

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