Christopher Shays: “The board of trustees of the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund, they are the group that oversees the Medicare Trust Fund.…”

“The board of trustees of the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund, they are the group that oversees the Medicare Trust Fund. People in this country pay Medicare in two ways, health care for the elderly. One is they put money aside in the trust fund. That is the trust fund I allude to. If they are hired by an employer, they pay 1.45 percent of their income into this trust fund. If they are self-employed, they pay double, 2.9 percent. This money goes in the trust fund to be there when they are older and it pays all Medicare Part A, which is the hospital costs of a senior. Then you have Medicare Part B, which is paid in part by the individual in a premium, but most of it is paid for by the government in direct taxes coming out of the tax income each year. But the trust fund, we were told, was going bankrupt, and not by an organization separate from the administration; the administration was telling us. President Clinton's appointees, 5 of the 7 people who sit on this board were his appointees, they said it was going to go bankrupt by the year 2002. They said that 2 years ago. Last year they said it would go bankrupt by the year 2001. After he vetoed the bill they pointed that out. So it was now going to go bankrupt a year earlier. And last week they just reaffirmed that the trust fund will run out of money by the year 2001. So you could say, well, we are playing with dynamite. I do not consider it a game, and the gentleman does not either.”