Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act Of 2009
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. CRAPO. Madam President, I am here to speak in support of the Gregg amendment. I rise in support of my colleague's amendment because it would prohibit using Medicare cuts in the Democratic health care bill to pay for new government spending.
It is interesting, as you listen to the debate--in fact, I was interested to hear my colleague from North Dakota say the Republican amendments would increase the deficit. They would only do that if you assume all of the spending in the bill, which is also opposed by the Republicans.
One of the key parts of the debate that I think needs to be emphasized here is, among all of the other things this bill does, when you have the first full 10 years of real implementation of the bill, it is a $2.5 trillion increase in Federal spending, paid for with hundreds of billions--in fact, trillions in new taxes and cuts in Medicare.
The purpose of the Gregg amendment is to require that when we do achieve savings in Medicare, instead of it being used to just transfer into a new government entitlement program, making Medicare less solvent, we use the savings for Medicare itself.
In the first 10 years of their bill, we will see cuts in Medicare by $465 billion, every dollar of which will simply be transferred over to a massive new Federal entitlement program. If you actually take the first 10 full years of the implementation of the bill--and recall that there are some budget gimmicks being played to say it is not generating a deficit, and it is not really implemented fully until about 4 years into the bill--if you take the first
10 years of implementation, the cuts to Medicare are not $465 billion but $1 trillion, and $3 trillion over a longer period of time as we evaluate the bill moving into the future.
In Medicare's hospital insurance trust fund, annual outlays already exceed the annual income, so the fund is drawing down its holdings to pay full benefits--but not for long. By 2017, the HI trust fund will be insolvent and will no longer able to pay full benefits for seniors. These cuts will make it worse.
This amendment provides that the major provisions in the underlying bill, including the subsidies and Medicaid expansion, cannot go into effect unless the Director of OMB and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services certify that all of the projected spending in the bill is offset with savings, but that savings shall exclude any changes to Medicare or Social Security. In other words, we require that Medicare savings be used for Medicare and Social Security savings be used for Social Security. This will ensure that the savings generated from the Medicare cuts in the bill don't go toward the creation of a new entitlement program at the expense of our seniors. If the non-Medicare savings don't offset the new costs, then the Secretary of the Treasury and the Secretary of HHS are prohibited from implementing new spending or revenue-reduction provisions in the bill.
Republicans have opposed the Reid bill's harmful cuts to Medicare through three votes. Should those cuts remain, the Gregg amendment makes sure Medicare savings go to making the program more solvent, not to offsetting the new entitlement programs.
Congress should not raid Medicare--a program that has $38 trillion in unfunded liabilities--and use it as a piggy bank to pay for a new health care entitlement. The government already has $70 trillion in unfunded obligations over the next 75 years, and we should not add to it with these dangerous provisions. The $70 trillion in unfunded obligations represents a burden of $600,000 per American household. The Reid bill carries an estimated cost of $2.5 trillion over the first 10 years that it is fully implemented. It is fully loaded with budget gimmicks.
Earlier in the debate, we voted 100 to 0 for the Bennet amendment--a rule of construction--which stated that nothing in the bill ``shall result in the reduction of guaranteed'' Medicare benefits. In contrast with the Bennet amendment, the Gregg amendment actually guarantees there will be Medicare for future generations, while guarding against the creation of a new unfunded entitlement this country cannot afford.
I wish to respond a little bit to some of the arguments my colleague from North Dakota just made.
I mentioned we have had three votes already to try to take these Medicare cuts out of the bill. All of those votes have failed. The Senator from North Dakota indicated those votes would have reduced the deficit or would have caused a huge deficit problem. That is only true if you assume the $2.5 trillion of spending in the bill will continue.
But those who claim there is a reduction in the deficit in this bill can do so only if they assume three things--one, if they assume the budget gimmicks are implemented. They have not included the SGR payments for physicians--a $245 billion cost over the next 10 years. It is just not in the bill because it cannot be accounted for.
Second, they have delayed the cost implementation portions of the bill by 4 years now, so that they have 10 years of revenue and 4 years of spending, so they can claim it balances. Even then, they cannot claim this bill helps the deficit unless they assume the hundreds of billions of dollars of new taxes and the hundreds of billions of dollars of cuts in Medicare. If any one of those items was taken out--the Medicare cuts, the tax increases, or the budget gimmicks--this bill would be shown to be what it is: a huge expansion of the Federal Government that is going to necessitate increased tax burdens and reductions in spending, as well as budget gimmicks to hide what cannot be hidden in order to claim it doesn't generate a deficit. I think most Americans understand that those kinds of gimmicks are the things we see all the time in Congress when we are trying to make it look as if we are not engaging in debt spending and increasing the national debt.
The bottom line here is that there is a significant amount of reform that can be achieved, that can reduce the cost of health care, that can reduce the cost of health insurance premiums, that we could agree to on a bipartisan basis if we were not stuck in this debate on the insistence that we create a massive new intrusion of the Federal Government into the operation and control of the health care economy and the development of another massive new Federal entitlement program at the expense of some of the current entitlement programs.
I haven't even talked about what is being done in Medicaid yet. I am sure others will talk about that.
This bill, as I said, will increase spending and the size of the government by $2.5 trillion. It will cut Medicare benefits over that same true full period by $1 trillion. It will increase taxes by hundreds of billions of dollars, and over that true full 10-year period of implementation, over $1 trillion. It will force the neediest of our uninsured in this country not into the opportunity to gain insurance coverage but into another failing entitlement program, which is Medicaid. It will drive a massive, unfunded mandate onto our States, which are already trying to figure out how they are going to deal with their fiscal problems. It will cause the cost of health insurance to go up for 30 percent of all Americans immediately and for the 70 percent who are in the large groups and get insurance from large companies, and they will basically see no significant savings and ultimately more taxes.
The bottom line is, we are not going to see an increase in the ability to control or handle the cost of health care. We are going to see an increase in government, an increase in government controls, an increase in taxes, and a reduction in the stability of our Medicare programs. That is not the way we should approach reform.
The Gregg amendment simply says let's create a lockbox, if you will, for Medicare, the same kind of lockbox we need for Social Security to keep the Congress from continuing to raid Social Security. Let's put it into place to ensure that all these great statements we hear on the floor about how we want to protect and preserve Medicare are enforced.
It simply creates by power of law, by force of law, the necessary mechanism to help all of us be sure that what we are talking about on the floor actually happens; namely, that we protect Medicare from being raided for the establishment of yet again another massive Federal entitlement program.
Madam President, I yield back my time.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source