Heidi Alexander: “I congratulate the junior Senator from Tennessee for his usual good judgment and insight in working on a difficult…”

“I congratulate the junior Senator from Tennessee for his usual good judgment and insight in working on a difficult problem. No Member of this body has done more in the last year to try to highlight the problem of the Federal debt. Through his cap plan, which has been a part of almost every discussion we have had seriously about it, through his effort--more recently to support efforts to try to achieve $4 trillion in debt reduction as a part of the select committee, and his suggestion today that allowing Americans to understand something that most of us hadn't focused on--that during our lifetimes we are paying in $110,000, $120,000 into Medicare and taking out, during our lifetimes, $350,000 or so, and that is a problem that has to be solved. I have been doing research lately on our debt situation. Fundamentally speaking, our problem lies with health care costs. It lies with families, businesses, and with the U.S. Government. Our discretionary spending--the kind we appropriate every year--on everything from national parks and national defense to roads and bridges, that is about 39 percent of the budget. If we stick to our guns on the agreement we made in early August, that will only grow at a little less than the rate of inflation. But it would go over to the mandatory spending, which is about 55 percent of our spending. It is going to go up three times the rate of inflation, and the fastest growing part of that mandatory spending is Medicare and Medicaid.…”