Health Plan Will Cut Grandma’s Medicare By Half A Trillion
Senator Lamar Alexander today made the following remarks on the floor of the U.S. Senate:
· “What Senator McCain is basically saying with his amendment is, don’t cut Grandma’s Medicare to pay for someone else’s insurance.”
· “If you find savings by cutting waste, fraud and abuse in Grandma’s Medicare, spend those savings on Grandma. Medicare’s trustees have said to us that there are trillion in unfunded liabilities for the Medicare program, and that the program will start going bankrupt between 2015 and 2017. According to the Medicare trustees, ‘We need timely and effective action to address Medicare’s challenges.’ I don’t think the Medicare trustees were thinking that the timely and effective action we could take to keep Medicare from going broke was to take 5 billion out of it and spend it on some new program.”
Click to learn more…
· “Rather than take my word for it, let’s go to a Wall Street Journal headline: `Some Health Premiums to Rise.’ That means the cost of your insurance is going up. So my question is, why would we spend .5 trillion over ten years, cut Medicare, raise taxes and run up the debt to raise some Americans’ health care premiums? I thought the whole exercise was to lower the cost of health care premiums.”
· “This bill is historic in thinking we could take a system that affects almost all Americans and change it all at once. Why don’t we instead go step by step to re-earn the trust of the American people? Republicans will be making those proposals on the Senate floor this month and next month and as long as it takes to get real health care reform. Cutting Grandma’s Medicare by half a trillion dollars and spending it on a new program at a time when Medicare is going broke is not real health care reform.”
Full Alexander remarks:
Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that during the 30 minutes controlled by the Republicans, we be allowed to engage in a colloquy.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I will begin by making some comments about the amendment Senator McCain, my colleague from Arizona, has filed. This is an amendment that, as the minority leader just said, will protect America’s seniors. It will disallow the Medicare cuts this bill includes.
The economist Milton Friedman famously said, “There is no such thing as a free lunch,” and that applies to health care as well. There is no such thing as free health care. Someone has to pay. Since this bill is a .5 trillion bill, the first question is, Who pays? The first answer to who pays is, it is America’s seniors, because about half of the cost of the bill is allegedly paid for by cuts to Medicare.
Let me break down a little bit more specifically than the Republican leader did exactly what that means. This is about 0 billion in Medicare cuts as follows: 7.5 billion from hospitals who treat seniors; 0 billion from Medicare Advantage, which is the insurance program that provides benefits to seniors which will be cut more than in half as a result of this 0 billion reduction; .6 billion from nursing homes that treat seniors; .1 billion from home health care for seniors; and .7 billion from hospice care, one of the most cruel cuts of all. Obviously, with cut this dramatic there is no way to avoid jeopardizing the care seniors now enjoy, and seniors know this. That is why they have been writing our offices and attending townhall meetings to let us know they disapprove of this. I quoted from two letters constituents of mine from Arizona sent asking to please not cut their Medicare Advantage Program. This has been called the crown jewel of the Medicare system, and many of them rely on Medicare Advantage for dental care or vision care or hearing assistance they have come to rely on. They are not buying the claims that somehow or other we can make /2 trillion cuts in Medicare without somehow hurting their care. They know better than that, and they are right. The care they have been promised will be compromised to pay for this new government entitlement under the bill.
Finally, many are wondering what happened to the promise that they get to keep the care they have. We all heard the President say that many times: If you like the care you have, you get to keep it. That is simply not true. There are 337,000 Arizonans who are Medicare Advantage patients. They like what they have. Yet we know, according to the Congressional Budget Office, that the benefits they have under Medicare Advantage are going to be cut by more than half. They are saying: What happened to the policy I like? I am not going to be able to keep it if this bill passes.
This is why the McCain amendment must pass. If our Democratic colleagues are not willing to protect Medicare, then I cannot imagine how the bill could otherwise be made acceptable since it starts with the commitments that Congress and the President have made to our senior citizens.
Perhaps one of the reasons why there are different numbers from one side of the aisle to the other is that sometimes we are not talking apples to apples. We are talking apples to oranges, and perhaps both numbers are correct in their context. The Senator from Tennessee used the number .5 trillion when the program is fully implemented. That is a very important statement. The other side will argue it is only 1/2 trillion for the first 10 years of the program. That is a correct statement. But it is .5 trillion for the first 10 years of total implementation of the program. What is the reason for the difference? For the first 4 years, money is being collected, but very few benefits are going out. The benefits start after year No. 4. So if we take the first 10 years of the program, we are collecting money to pay for it over the entire 10 years, but almost all of the benefits only occur during the last 6 years. Naturally, we have collected more money than we have paid out. But when we take the first 10 years of full implementation, it is as my colleague from Tennessee noted, a cost of .5 trillion. That is how sometimes we get somewhat different numbers.
As long as we are clear about what we are talking about, one thing is crystal clear: Whether it is 1/2 trillion or .5 trillion, we are talking real money. Somebody has to pay for it. If America’s seniors are being asked to pay for half of it, that is not fair to America’s seniors, given the commitment we have made to them. That is the point of the McCain amendment. Protect Medicare, protect America’s seniors. We can do that with the simple amendment Senator McCain has which is send the bill back to committee — it would only take 1 day — and send it back here without those Medicare cuts in the bill.
Mr. ALEXANDER. I see the Senator from Idaho here. I wish to hear his observations on this. If there is any issue in this entire health care debate that symbolizes why we on the Republican side want to change the debate to a step-by-step approach to reducing the cost of premiums, it would be the Medicare issue. As the Senator from Arizona said, what we need to do about Medicare is make it solvent as quickly as we can, as effectively as we can. The Senator from Kansas said the other day that the proposal to take 5 billion from grandma’s Medicare and spend on it some new program is like writing a check on an overdrawn account in a bank to buy a big, new car. There is a lot of truth to that.
The President said earlier this year something I agree with. He said this health care debate is not just about health care. It is about the role of the Federal Government in the everyday life of Americans. He is exactly right about that. This health care debate, which we are beginning this week, is not just about health care. It is about the stimulus package, about the takeover of General Motors. It is about the trillion dollar debt. It is about the Washington takeovers. It is about too much spending, too much taxes, too much debt. The Medicare provisions in this bill are a perfect symbol of that. That is why Senator McCain is right. What he is saying is, don’t cut grandma’s Medicare and spend it on some new program. If you can find some savings in the waste, fraud, and abuse of grandma’s Medicare, spend on it grandma. Make sure those of us who are older and those of us who are younger and looking forward to Medicare can count on its solvency.
Later this week we will talk more about premiums going up. There was a lot of discussion yesterday because, according to the Wall Street Journal, some health premiums would rise. For people who get their insurance from large employers, this bill won’t make much difference. And for small employers, if you get your insurance from a small employer, it won’t make much difference. If you are going to the individual market to buy insurance yourself, your premiums will go up, except we are going to get some money from somewhere to help pay part of your premiums, at least for about half of Americans who are in the individual market. Where are we going to get that money? From grandma. We are going to get it from Medicare. So that is what is wrong with this bill. And what is right about the McCain amendment is, it says simply, don’t cut Medicare. If we find savings, which we hope we can in Medicare, we should spend it on making Medicare solvent.
I wonder if the Senator from Idaho is hearing from seniors in his State about the proposed 5 billion cuts to Medicare and how they feel about taking that money and spending it to create a new program?
Mr. CRAPO. I thank the Senator from Tennessee. Very definitely we are hearing from seniors in Idaho who see through this. It is very clear to the folks in Idaho
