Jack Kingston: “Mrs. Lucille Harris lives in the First District of Georgia. She is 69 years old. For the past 3 years she has been…”

“Mrs. Lucille Harris lives in the First District of Georgia. She is 69 years old. For the past 3 years she has been somewhat worried about her health care, affectionately known as Medicare, because she knows that in April of 1995 the Medicare trustees said Medicare is going bankrupt and that Congress needed to act to preserve and protect it. We tried for many years to protect it and preserve it; but, unfortunately, politics got in the way. Then, last year, we finally came up with a bipartisan solution which the House passed, the Senate passed and the President signed into law. We did do some good Medicare reform. We gave our seniors a choice of plans. We cut fraud and abuse. We increased spending from $5,000 to $7,000 per person. In addition to that, we said that States are required to cover people who have fallen through the cracks; to come up with something for people who were not Medicare-eligible, like the 51-year-old man from Vermont that I talked to last night; people who cannot get coverage through the standard health care market. The bill required that States come up with plans, each State, to protect these people. The second thing that it did along that line is it said that we would set up a bipartisan Medicare committee; and the bipartisan committee, which is chaired by a Clinton-appointed Democrat Senator, would address the long-term solvency needs of Medicare as more and more baby boomers retire and use this coverage.”