Bill Clinton: “That's right. Before you were aging. [Laughter] I'd like to just talk for a couple of minutes and then spend the rest of…”

“That's right. Before you were aging. [Laughter] I'd like to just talk for a couple of minutes and then spend the rest of the time listening to you, trying to answer your questions or at least hearing your concerns about this. You all know we're in a major debate in Washington about balancing the budget, and we're trying to balance the budget. I think that's a good thing to do. Our country never had a permanent deficit in our Government accounts until the 12 years before I became President, and I've tried to change that. When I became President, the annual deficit was $290 billion a year; we've now got it down to $160 billion a year. That's a huge decrease in only 3 years, and I'm proud of that. But we have to ask ourselves now that we're going to go all the way and balance this budget, why are we doing it, and how are we going to do it in a way that reflects our basic values as Americans, our sense of personal responsibility, our sense of family responsibility, our respon- sibility to our communities? And maybe most important, what are the obligations we owe to each other across generational lines and across income lines in America? How can we balance the budget in a way that permits us to honor these values and these obligations? We want to balance the budget because we'd like to take this debt off of our children and grandchildren, because we would like not to spend so much money every year paying off interest on the debt so we'd have more money to invest in things like education and health care and the economy, but we have to do it in the right way. Now, I have offered the Congress a balanced budget that increases our investment in education, because I think we owe the next generation quite a lot--in a global economy they'll need more education and because so many of our children, particularly poorer children, need the tools to work themselves into the middle class. I have offered a balanced budget that continues our fundamental obligations to clean air, clean water, safe food, public health, and the environment. And I have offered a balanced budget that deals with the need to slow the rate of growth in medical expenses so that health care does not consume the entire budget and does not take more and more of our income and more and more of your income. Now, in addition to that, there is this issue with the Medicare Trust Fund, which the congressional majority, the Republican majority, has made a great deal of. But I'd like to talk a little about the Medicare Trust Fund and what its relationship is to the budget, and then we can hear from you. The Congress has proposed to balance the budget in 7 years and to pay for a $250 billion tax cut and to cut Medicare by about $270 billion over that 7-year period and to cut Medicaid by about $180 billion over that 7-year period. My proposals, which balance the budget in 10 years with a much smaller tax cut, have a Medicare reduction that's less than half of theirs and a Medicaid reduction that's about a third of theirs. Now, if you hear them talk, they will say two things. They will say, first of all, ``We're not cutting anything; we're just slowing the rate of inflation in these programs.'' And secondly, they'll say, ``We have to cut Medicare because it's necessary for the Trust Fund.'' So I would like to deal with both of those issues if I might. First of all, on the Trust Fund, there's a legitimate issue with the Trust Fund. Our administration brought it up in '93 and in '94 in the health care debate. And many of the same people who are saying we have to cut Medicare by $270 billion today were denying that we could have any reductions at all just last year and denying that there was big problem with the Trust Fund. But there is a problem with the Trust Fund. And so our obligation, not only to the people on Medicare today but to the people we want to have Medicare in the future, our obligation is to fix the Trust Fund. The actuaries say that we need to put about $90 billion into fixing the Trust Fund. That is, if we put $90 billion in, we will secure it for another decade, and during that decade, we'll have time to figure out what we're going to do when all the baby boomers retire and they get on Medicare because then there will be a lot more people on Medicare. But neither proposal really deals with that. We're just talking about how to add a few more years, 10, 11, 12 years to the Trust Fund. My proposal takes it out 11 years from today. And that's better than we're been doing in most of the last 15 years. My proposal does it by recognizing that the Trust Fund essentially provides hospital care and other services and is paid for essentially by asking the providers to take less money in the future and by cracking down on fraud and abuse. And by the way, we have a study which says that Medicare fraud and abuse is about 10 percent of our total cost. And we have the United States Attorney here for this part of Florida, and he can tell you what we're trying to do in Florida. But we have doubled the prosecutions on fraud and abuse, we have assigned 3 times as many FBI agents to try to crack down on fraud and abuse as any previous administration, and we've brought in more money from people who are skimming the system illegally than ever before. So there is a lot of money there. And we can do that. Their proposal would ask the beneficiaries of the system to pay more, dramatically more. And it's important that you realize that in their Medicare cuts, about half of them will be absorbed by providers or by improvements in fraud and abuse, but about half of them will come from beneficiaries. And none of that money goes into the Trust Fund. So let's get that on the table. This has nothing to do with the Trust Fund. And the only way you can get money from beneficiaries is either to charge more or give fewer services or serve fewer people. And that all goes into the budget. Now, on Medicaid, 30 percent of Medicaid goes to care for poor women and their poor children, but 70 percent of it goes to pay for health care for the elderly and the disabled. So this dramatic Medicaid cut, since the elderly people who get that are disproportionately low income, will have to either be paid for by their children or it means that we're going to serve fewer people. There will be fewer people in nursing homes, fewer people getting in-home services and things of that kind. You just simply can't decree that the rate of medical inflation will go down to the level they say it will, because we have more and more older people coming onto the system all the time and, thank goodness, living longer and living better. So what we need to do is to find the right way to balance the budget, in a way that preserves the Medicare Trust Fund and extends it for at least a decade but does not, does not, cripple the health care system for today's elderly and those who will be coming on in the next decade. Seventy-five percent of the people on Medicare live on less than $24,000 a year. So I say to all of you, we need to be open to changes in the system--we can't continue to let it grow at 10 percent a year--but we need to do it in a way that recognizes our obligations across generational lines and across income lines. And we have to be very careful before we approve of a system that would cost our seniors a huge amount more or cause them to have to give up medical services in order to fund tax cuts that go to people like me who don't really need it--and haven't asked for it, to be fair, haven't asked for it. So my point is we can have a tax cut if we target it toward raising children and educating people and middle income people who need it. We can have a balanced budget and we can fix the Medicare Trust Fund and we can do all of that without imposing undue burdens on Medicare and Medicaid recipients who simply cannot afford it. And that's the trick. That is what our obligation ought to be. And I believe that a proposal that would basically reduce future spending in health care by $450 billion, almost half a trillion dollars, you're either going to--you're going to do one of two things: You're going to either close a lot of hospitals in rural areas and urban areas and teaching hospitals and take a lot of doctors out of the system who won't serve anymore, or you're going to hurt the beneficiaries either by charging them more than they can afford or simply by not serving a lot of elderly people anymore. So that's the point I've been trying to make going around America. We all have an obligation to fix the Trust Fund, but the proposals in Congress go way beyond that. About half the money in Medicare will go to fix the Trust Fund; the other half goes to their balanced budget tax cut plan. And there's no way around it; that's just the fact. And I just don't think that's right. Governor, do you want to say anything? [At this point, Governor Chiles explained that Florida would be greatly affected by proposed Medicare and Medicaid cuts because its population is rapidly increasing.]”