Repealing Mandatory Funding for Graduate Medical Education

Floor Speech

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Mr. GUTHRIE. Madam Speaker, as we began the debate about Medicare just a minute ago, we knew last week when we left to go home to work in our districts that Medicare's actuary said it is going to go bankrupt in 2024.

This side of the aisle has offered a plan to make it stable, secure and sustainable. There is no member--no member as we heard all day yesterday--of the Greatest Generation on whom this will have any effect. As a matter of fact, over half the baby boomer generation will have no changes. We are changing Medicare to make it work so it is sustainable.

If we follow the plan introduced by the President, which does raise taxes on the rich but still does not address the sustainability of Medicare in the future, my daughter, when she is my age 30 years from now, will wake up and go to work, and 100 percent of the Federal income tax she pays will pay for my generation to be retired. The Greatest Generation provided my generation opportunities, and we're working to make sure our children have opportunities as well.

On the underlying bill, what's interesting is that this bill only takes this program back to the way it was passed out of the House in the health care bill. We are doing exactly what the majority passed out of the House. It changed to a mandatory program in the Senate, and was adopted when it came back from the Senate.

So, if this program is so important that it has to be mandatory funding as they say it has to be, why didn't they do it when they debated the health care bill before and include the provision that is in this motion to recommit?

As a matter of fact, this bill authorizes changes in medical education in hospitals, teaching hospitals, children's hospitals, nurses' programs, geriatric programs, pediatric programs. There are all sorts of them, and none of them have the provision that this motion to recommit wants to put on this program.

So I say we need to get a handle on the budget so we can have a future for this country. We need to quit putting programs on autopilot, and put them in the process, that they go through the appropriations process so they can be reviewed and they can be determined which programs are successful and moving forward.

It is important that we have primary care physicians trained at teaching health centers, but it's also important we have them at children's hospitals that were zeroed out in the President's budget. So as we put these programs on mandatory spending, we are losing opportunities to fund other programs. Community health centers, they compete for discretionary funding. This is money that would be taken from that area and on to mandatory funding.

So, Madam Speaker, this side of the House is ready to say to the Greatest Generation, we're preserving what you have. We also want to tell our children they have a future as great as the Greatest Generation gave us.

Madam Speaker, I ask my colleagues to vote against this motion to recommit.

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