Bill Clinton: “Well, I think--that goes back to the Medicare question one of you asked--Ken, I guess. I believe we have to find a…”

“Well, I think--that goes back to the Medicare question one of you asked--Ken, I guess. I believe we have to find a bipartisan framework to look at the longer, if you will, the baby boom issues presented in Social Security and Medicare. And as I said, I think there has to be some sort of commission, some sort of functioning bipartisan way of looking at that. But that must not be an excuse for any of us, including me, to avoid doing what it takes right now to put a decade of life on the Medicare Trust Fund. In other words, we need to fix Medicare for a decade right now. And we have agreed upon savings that will do that. And we lost a year last year. Thank goodness it didn't hurt us too bad because the inflation rate dropped so much in medical costs. But we don't need to lose another year. We ought to make an agreement now, put a decade of life on the Medicare Trust Fund, and then agree upon a bipartisan mechanism that could look at what things can be done which wouldn't be particularly dramatic if we move now, to deal with the problems that Social Security will encounter in the third decade of the next century and the problems that Medicare will encounter when all the baby boomers go on it. But those things can be salvaged and resolved with modest changes if we move now because it's so far into the future. But that kind of a bipartisan mechanism cannot and must not be used to avoid dealing with the Medicare Trust Fund problem that exists right now. John [John Broder, Los Angeles Times], and then we'll go to--yes, go ahead, follow up, and then we'll do this one, and then I'll go over here.”