104th Congress: Democratic Perspectives 103rd-107th
Congress Committee Activity We object to the favorable reporting of this bill for a number of reasons.
The legislation was considered through a highly irregular and poorly defined process. It involves substantial cuts in the Medicare program and thus merits appropriate and proper consideration in a regular process. Although the individual provisions of the bill are essentially extensions of current law policies, a cavalier treatment which ignores the potential impacts in costs and on access to quality care for senior citizens in never appropriate. Such provisions should be considered in the context of a budget reconciliation bill or a health reform bill where proper treatment can be given to these issues.
Supporters of the bill specifically refused to identify the purposes for which savings would be used or to dedicate the money for any particular purpose. This abandons the Committee's traditional commitment to making such changes in full recognition and understanding of the entire range of possible approaches to budget savings. Historically, this has been accomplished in the context of budget reconciliation.
In the absence of a comprehensive reform bill, the only appropriate place to put the savings generated by this legislation would be back into the Medicare program or toward deficit reduction. Republicans on the Committee specifically rejected an amendment that would have earmarked these savings for deficit reduction. And the bill itself does not seek specifically to shore up the Medicare program. Indeed, at the markup, the author of the bill explicitly acknowledged a lack of control over where the savings would be used.
Consideration in a vacuum of a few isolated changes in the Medicare program makes little sense when major programmatic changes are promised and will likely be proposed in a few weeks or months as part of the regular budget process. In the absence of such a process, cohesive budgetary and Medicare policies become impossible.
The refusal to deal explicitly with the use of the savings suggests that the processing of the legislation was part of a public relations gimmick--aimed perhaps at funding a tax cut. If this was the aim of the legislation, then this should have been made explicit. Many members have concerns about financing tax cuts--particularly those that favor wealthier Americans at the expense of the middle class--with new burdens on elderly Americans.
In sum, Democrats support deficit reduction, meaningful health care reform, and stabilization and improvement of the Medicare program. Where changes in the program can be undertaken to achieve these ends, we intent to be fully supportive. However, where changes are used for unspecified or political ends, we cannot support them--no matter how non-controversial they are made out to be. Placing new burdens on Medicare beneficiaries, providers and private employers should never be taken lightly. And they never should be made part of a larger political game.
For these reasons we respectfully dissent from the views expressed by the majority.
John D. Dingell.
Henry A. Waxman.
Edward J. Markey.
W.J. Billy Tauzin.
Ron Wyden.
Ralph M. Hall.
John Bryant.
Rick Boucher.
Thomas J. Manton.
Edolphus Towns.
Gerry E. Studds.
Frank Pallone, Jr.
Sherrod Brown.
Blanche Lambert Lincoln.
Bart Gordon.
Elizabeth Furse.
Peter Deutsch.
Bobby L. Rush.
Anna G. Eshoo.
Ron Klink.
Bart Stupak.
104th Congress: Democratic Perspectives
103rd-107th
Congress Committee Activity