Bill Clinton: “Here's what my concerns are. Will I work with them and try to work this out? Absolutely. But here's what my concerns…”

“Here's what my concerns are. Will I work with them and try to work this out? Absolutely. But here's what my concerns are. It sounds like a lot to increase something by one-third over 7 years. But that's about 4 percent a year. And this last year we had medical inflation at about 4\1/2\ percent, and that was good. We don't know whether it will stay that way, and the problem is that the Medicare population is going to get older and older. And as they get older, people use the system more. So I don't know that we can keep it to 4 percent a year. The Republican in the Senate, Senator Packwood, with the major responsibility for this says that we can stabilize the financial fund of Medicare with savings at about half the level proposed in the Speaker's budget. It's not really his budget, but--well, it is now. They passed it. And I would prefer not to say right now we're going to cut at a level greater than I believe we have to in ways that I think will certainly require a lot of people who cannot afford it to pay more until we have explored all other alternatives, because I believe we can get there without doing this. And as you know, I believe--let me say, there are going to have to be some changes. We cannot leave the system the way it is. We can't pretend that just because we're at a senior center that there will be no changes. There have to be some changes. But I think these reductions from the projected levels of spending I think are too severe, and what I favor is having a smaller tax cut and a smaller Medicare reduction and Medicaid reduction. And then let's see how much we can save year by year, because we have not tried a lot of these things. He and I both, for example--I really believe you ought to have incentives to join managed care plans. I don't think anybody ought to make you do it; I just think you ought to have incentives to do it. Out West, I know, there's one managed care plan for Medicare that offers people the right to get into Medicare for 95 percent of what the per- person cost is, and they give them a prescription drug benefit along with health care and still make money. I think you should have the right--I think, you know, people ought to be able to try to talk you into doing that, that that ought to be an option, not a requirement. If you want to stay in the program, I think you ought to be able to stay in the program. The way it works now is, you don't pay for part A, but you do pay more, as you said, by about the rate of inflation for the doctor bills and things like that. So that's where I would start these negotiations. I'd say, let's cut it as little as possible until we know how much we can save, because if we lock ourselves into a tax cut and we lock ourselves into other spending, then we'll wind up just not funding it, even if we wind up hurting people. And I don't think we ought to do that. I have no problem with all these experiments, but let's know what we're going to do. Speaker Gingrich. Can I make one other comment? I'll just make one quick comment, and then we'll go back to a question here. But let me just say, I think in spirit we're not that far apart. The thing that is driving us is that the trustees reported that Medicare will go broke by 2002. It starts to lose money next year and it literally runs--this is part A. This the hospital part. And all of you-- folks who may be watching may not get it, but every person in this room understands part A, or every person in this plaza understands part A. We start first with two big steps here. And then I think we can talk about exactly how we make the transition. One is, how do we save it for your generation? And that's very, very important. And we have to--and the earlier we can take some changes, the easier it's going to be to make that transition by 2002. But I must tell you--I become 52 this coming week. And I'm older than he is, and you can see where the gray hair up here--but I started thinking about when the baby boomers start to retire, the weight of the current system financially is so enormous--and we've seen some numbers-- $3,500,000,000,000 a year would be the cost of Medicare alone, not counting Social Security. And so, part of what I hope we can do is set up a second commission--to go back to this gentleman's idea--and this would be a commission that would look out beyond saving Medicare in the short run and start to talk now about what do we need to do for the baby boomers in their retirement years and their health care. Because frankly, that makes everything we're worried about--the folks who replace us 20 years from now are going to have a much bigger challenge than we have in figuring out how the baby boomers retire and what happens with them. But I think that's something we could probably work on in a positive way together.”