Jay Rockefeller: “I want to acknowledge the very serious implications of the Medicare trustees' report released yesterday. The Medicare…”

“I want to acknowledge the very serious implications of the Medicare trustees' report released yesterday. The Medicare part A trust fund, the part that pays the hospital bills of beneficiaries, is likely to be insolvent by 2001, a year earlier than predicted last year. This is a very serious issue. I take it as such, and it must be addressed. So the news is bad, Mr. President. Unfortunately, contrary to assertions made by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, this is not a new problem, and unlike the Republicans, this is not a problem Democrats just discovered. The Republicans chose to ignore 20 previous trustees' reports that warned of future trust fund problems. But when they needed to come up with the money to pay for tax breaks, they decided to manufacture an impending crisis. Just 3 years ago, as the Senator from Massachusetts and I were discussing, the trustees projected the hospital trust fund was going to run out of money in 1999, which is 3 years hence. Democrats took immediate measures, and I know because I was responsible for putting some of those together, to add 3 more years of solvency by very carefully reducing Medicare spending by about $59 billion. And, Mr. President, Democrats have produced our own Medicare proposals that would postpone the date of trust insolvency for at least another decade.”