On the recordApril 14, 2011
I thank the ranking member. I'm glad my colleague raised the issue of the bipartisan fiscal commission, because the fiscal commission took a look at the Republican budget plan and said it was not balanced and not comprehensive and not a way to achieve deficit reduction in a responsible way. That was the verdict of the bipartisan commission. Why did they say it was unbalanced? Because the Republican budget provides big tax breaks for special interests. You don't get rid of the subsidies to the big oil companies. You want to give additional tax breaks to the very wealthy, including millionaires. And what do you do for the tradeoff? You cut funding for education for kids and you do end the Medicare guarantee. We're going to have time to talk about other parts of the bill later on, but I want to talk about that now because it's going to be the subject of the previous question. What this budget does is say to seniors, you no longer may stay in the Medicare program today; you have to go into the private insurance market. And the way it saves money is it says, as those costs in the private insurance market continue to go up, you are not going to get premium support that will keep up with it. You're going to get something that's a relatively fixed value compared to the rapidly rising health care costs, which is why, as the President said yesterday, in the year 2022 seniors would pay more under the Republican budget plan by over $6,300 than they do under current Medicare.…
