Bill Clinton: “He said much of the program is funded with cuts in Medicare; do I really think it won't affect the recipients?…”

“He said much of the program is funded with cuts in Medicare; do I really think it won't affect the recipients? Absolutely. Let me just tell you. We just adopted a budget in Washington which cuts defense deeply, just as much as we can, and we shouldn't do a dollar more. But we have cut it dramatically. And that's one of the reasons the California unemployment rate is up, right, because defense has been cut since 1987. But there's a limit to how much it can be cut. It's cut, absolutely. It freezes all domestic discretionary spending. That is, if I want to put more money into defense conversion in California, or Head Start, or public health clinics, the Congress and the Members here will tell you, they have to find for the next 5 years a dollar in cuts somewhere else for every dollar we want to spend in some new program. The only thing we're increasing, except for the cost of living in retirement programs, is Medicare and Medicaid. Everything else is declining or frozen. And Medicare and Medicaid, under this budget that they just adopted, with an inflation rate of under 4 percent, Medicaid is projected to grow at between 16 percent and 11 percent a year, and Medicare at between 11 percent and 9 percent a year. In other words, over the next 5 year period, both will grow at more than 3 times the rate of inflation. What we propose to do is to let them grow at twice the rate of inflation, too. I think we can live with twice the rate of inflation. Yes, I do. Why? Because the rate of reimbursement increases to doctors and hospitals need not go up so fast in Medicare, because we're going to close the gap between Medicare in the private sector and what doctors and hospitals get. And they will actually save money because we're going to dramatically cut their administrative costs. So they will be getting a raise through reduced administrative expenses that they won't have to get through greater outlays of taxpayer money. And we're going to turn right around and invest that money and more into the drug benefit in the long-term care. I don't know anybody who has really looked at this thing closely who doesn't think we can get it. Now, there may be people who try to stop us from getting it, but if we can't get a Government health care program down to the point where it can run on twice the rate of inflation, we're in deep trouble. I believe we can, and the program explicitly provides that none of the benefits can be cut. [Ms. Brown introduced Jo Barbano, national chair of the AARP legislative council, who discussed the rate of inflation on prescription drug prices without health care reform. A participant then asked if the new health care plan would control the rising cost of prescription drugs.]”