Bill Clinton: “We still have some differences of opinion. Let me go back through them. On the upper income premiums for Medicare, we…”

“We still have some differences of opinion. Let me go back through them. On the upper income premiums for Medicare, we have some differences in how we think it should be structured, but the main stumbling block seems to have been that the Republicans don't want it to look like an IRS tax payment. They don't want it to look like a tax increase, even though it wouldn't be. Our problem is if HHS collected these upper income premiums, they'd have to set up a whole new bureaucracy, and our people estimate that half the money would be lost. And we don't want another big problem of fraud and abuse here. So we've come up with an idea that we think would allow Treasury to collect the money but to have it go directly to the Medicare Trust Fund so there would be no question of a tax payment. And we think that would ease a lot of the Republican and, frankly, some of the Democratic concerns that it wouldn't look like a tax increase. But if we're going to collect the upper income premiums, surely, all Americans would say we shouldn't give away $12 billion. And you can't expect the really honest person to go out of his or her way to pay it and then half the people not pay it, and there would be a lot of disillusionment there. So we think we've solved that problem. That's a stumbling block. And we still have a difference over this refundability. We're going to try to work through that. But I think we can get it, but we--I offered a tax plan, as you know, right before I left for Europe, to show good faith in working with the Republicans. And I think we'll keep working through it until we get something that we can both live with. Nazi Gold and the Vatican”