Richard Gephardt: “this is a bad piece of legislation and I hope it is not passed, and I hope that the alternative that we have before the…”

“this is a bad piece of legislation and I hope it is not passed, and I hope that the alternative that we have before the House could be passed in its stead. I think this bill should be renamed. It should be the Savage the Medicare Trust Fund bill, because this bill takes $116 billion out of the Medicare Trust Fund. Now, why is that a concern? We have been worried for months and years about the Medicare Trust Fund. We have been saying how are we going to get enough money into the Medicare Trust Fund to extend its solvency? This bill will cut its solvency by 5 years. Now remember that we are in a time when we have the need to do something to put more money out of the Medicare Trust Fund to take care of problems from the 1997 Balanced Budget Act. We all have nursing home operators coming to see us because they do not have enough reimbursement out of the Medicare Trust Fund. Half the nursing homes in the country are bankrupt today because of the cut in reimbursements from the Medicare Trust Fund. The academic health institutions, I am visited by Washington University and St. Louis University in my town. They have been cut by the Medicare 1997 bill. They want restorations. The home health care people cannot get out to do the home health care visits and so we are probably, before we leave in this Congress, going to restore funding out of the Medicare Trust Fund for them. If we put it altogether, the savings from the 1997 Act over 10 years comes to over $200 billion.”