George Voinovich: “we have a saying in Ohio, especially north of Route 40, that you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. We are…”

“we have a saying in Ohio, especially north of Route 40, that you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. We are talking about a Medicare Part A surplus, and to not also recognize that we have a Part B Medicare responsibility and argue that we have a surplus when the figures show that when we put A and B together they are in deficit some $52 billion--there is no such thing as a Medicare surplus, if you are looking at Medicare as it really is, and that is Part A and Part B. In this budget, we are going to have about $36 billion more than what we expected in Part A, but on Part B--that is the out of hospital--we are going to be in deficit some $88 billion. When we put the two of them together, we are in deficit $52 billion. How can one talk about a Medicare surplus when we are in debt $52 billion? If we take the next 10 years, we are going to take in $393 billion more in Part A, but in Part B we are going to have to subsidize $1.36 trillion, and it all works out to be a deficit of $643 billion. The point I am making is this: There is no Medicare surplus; it is a fiction.”