Chuck Grassley: “about a year ago the President appointed trustees for the Medicare fund to study Medicare, to project its problems, its…”

“about a year ago the President appointed trustees for the Medicare fund to study Medicare, to project its problems, its solvency, and everything like that. A year ago, six trustees of the Medicare fund--and these are four people in the President's Cabinet and two citizens, one Republican and one Democrat, so altogether there would be five Democrats and one Republican-- unanimously said that the Medicare program would be bankrupt in the year 2002. They also said that Congress should take immediate action to keep the long-term viability of Medicare. They asked the Republican Congress to take action to do that. We did that. The Balanced Budget Act of 1995 is this 1,800-page bill, which took 13 committees over an 8-month period of time to put together, the first Balanced Budget Act passed by Congress in a quarter of a century, to balance the budget in 7 years. Part of this document is not only doing what President Clinton's trustees of the Medicare system asked us to do, to save it from bankruptcy, but we also gave senior citizens of America a choice that if they did not want to have traditional Medicare, we would pay for other forms of health care delivery.”