Congressional Budget For The United States Government For Fiscal Year 2008

Floor Speech

CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET FOR THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2008 -- (Senate - March 22, 2007)

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Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I thank my friend, the Senator from North Dakota, for his terrific work on this budget, and I rise to oppose the Ensign amendment.

Medicare is a social contract. Individuals pay into the program during their working years, and they receive health coverage when they retire. One good way to undermine universal support, to undermine support for the program is to arbitrarily make part of the Medicare population pay a significantly higher price for the same product. Ultimately, this will drive higher income individuals out of the program to purchase their own coverage. When that begins to occur, working individuals will begin to wonder why they are paying Medicare taxes when Medicare coverage may or may not be worth their while on retirement.

Medicare, I repeat, is a social contract. Efforts to undermine it, such as this one, will fail.

It is interesting that there are Members of this body who want to raise taxes on Medicare beneficiaries while at the same time cut taxes for Donald Trump. I repeat: Raise taxes for Medicare beneficiaries but cut taxes on some of the wealthiest individuals in our country. If you want to undermine Medicare, create winners and losers among its enrollees, then that is the way to do it.

There is something else at work here, though. I came to the House of Representatives 14 years ago, and almost immediately, I saw the hostility many Members of this body and that body felt toward Medicare. In 1995, when the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, one of the first things they did--it was their first opportunity to go after Medicare--they proposed tens of billions of dollars in cuts in Medicare in order to pay for their tax cuts for the wealthiest people. The same kind of thing here--cut Medicare to pay for tax cuts on the wealthiest people in our country. That is the kind of hostility they had. Every time they had a chance, once they were in the majority, they tried to do it.

The Speaker of the House in those days said that under his plan, Medicare would wither on the vine. So they began attempts to privatize Medicare, to shift to fee-for-service. Traditional Medicare, which had served this country well--at that point for three decades, now for four decades--they wanted to take traditional Medicare and to privatize it and push some Medicare beneficiaries out of traditional Medicare into Medicare managed care. The Government pays more for Medicare managed care, and beneficiaries and taxpayers get less for those dollars. But it is all part of their efforts to undermine Medicare.

Maybe we should go back further than 10 years ago or 14 years ago and go back to 1965 when Medicare was created. In this body, overwhelming numbers of Republicans opposed Medicare, the creation of it. In this body and across the hall, in the House of Representatives, a huge, overwhelming majority of Republicans opposed the creation of Medicare then. They were hostile to the concept of universal coverage, of making sure every elderly person in this country had the opportunity to enroll in Medicare. They are hostile to it today, and they were hostile to it in 1995, when Speaker Gingrich said Medicare would wither on the vine. They began the attempts to cut Medicare on the one hand and to do further damage by privatizing it on the other.

We are continuing to see this assault even now. They say they are for Medicare. They run television ads saying: We would never cut Medicare; we think it is a great program. But when they come to the floor of this body, of this Senate Chamber, over and over, from every different direction, they attack one of the single greatest programs that this Government has ever created and that our people have ever had.

In 1965, half the elderly in this country had no health insurance. Today, after 41 1/2 years of Medicare, almost everybody in our country is covered. If they had their way, they would begin to privatize, they would begin to cut, and Medicare would not be the universal program with the universal, overwhelming support of the people in this country.

If the Senate wants to reflect what the people in this country think, we should overwhelmingly defeat the Ensign amendment because it undercuts what is best about our health care system. It undercuts the universal nature of Medicare, which works for everybody. If you want to preserve Medicare, there are things we can do to fix it, to make some small adjustments. But this amendment is not the way. We should defeat the Ensign amendment.

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