Joe Barton: “In 1965 the hot car on the American market was a Ford Mustang, which cost less than $2,000. The President of the United…”

“In 1965 the hot car on the American market was a Ford Mustang, which cost less than $2,000. The President of the United States was Lyndon Johnson. The entire Federal budget was less than $100 billion. The war that was on the front pages was the war in south Vietnam. The Super Bowl didn't exist. Cell phones didn't exist. If you wanted to use a computer, you typed out your program on data index cards and submitted them in a batch to a mainframe computer. I believe the dominant mainframe was an IBM 360. Gasoline cost approximately 25 cents a gallon, and a little-noticed program was put into effect to help our senior citizens with their health care costs called Medicare. Forty-three years later, that Medicare program is going to expend over $400 billion to provide health care for over 45 million senior citizens in every State and territory of the United States. If something is not changed between now and the year 2018, in the year 2018, or 2019, the Medicare Trust Fund is going to be bankrupt. If we look back in 1965 at how health care was provided and look at how it's provided in 2008, you would see numerous differences. We now focus, in Medicare, through the Medicare Advantage programs, which 20 percent of our seniors have chosen, on preventive care. A lot of Medicare spending today is through drug therapy, as opposed to surgery, things of this sort. But the one thing that's constant has been the continuing escalation in cost.”