Martin Hoke: “I have a chart here that I think goes to exactly what the gentleman is talking about. This is a quotation from the…”

“I have a chart here that I think goes to exactly what the gentleman is talking about. This is a quotation from the trustees of the Medicare trust fund. These are five people, men and women appointed by the President of the United States. It includes three members of the President's Cabinet, Cabinet Secretaries Shalala, Rubin, and Reich, and the specific quote here is that the fund, the Medicare Health Insurance Trust Fund is projected to be exhausted in 2001. You have to ask yourself the question, is there a problem or is there not a problem? If there is a problem, then it seems to me that our responsibility as elected officials, as people who have been elected, Members of Congress that have been elected by the people in their districts to represent them, that if there is this problem that is a pressing problem, if it has been identified by the trustees of the President's trust fund, that we have an absolute responsibility to deal with that. And that if we do not deal with it, we are abrogating that responsibility in a way that is completely without precedent and terribly, terribly irresponsible in terms of the implications it has for the rest of the country.”