Thomas Coburn

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. And if we start today by preserving what money there is, and allowing it to earn a rate of interest that is comparable with other investments that we can have in a retirement program, and we can do that, and we can do that without putting it in the stock market, then we will start on the road to making it healthy again. The other point that I would make is that had we done what the gentleman suggested just for those 6 years, just those 6 years and not done it for any of the rest, we would have $4 trillion earning about $300 billion a year, which is more than what we are going to pay out in Social Security this year. And we would not be having to pay a penny in Social Security taxes. In other words, the power of compound interest, had we saved the money instead of spending it, we could lower everybody's Social Security taxes now. So we have to move to that, and we have to create that opportunity for our children. The gentleman from Minnesota.

Mr. COBURN. It is interesting to note, as this deficit, this amount of money that we are going to have to take from the general fund comes up, what we are going to do is we are either going to raise taxes or we are going to raise FICA taxes to take care of this, it is estimated a 25 percent FICA tax instead of the 12.5 percent FICA tax. The other thing to note, so everybody can really understand this idea about the debt, is the debt is growing at $275 million a day right now. Right now the national debt is growing at $275 million a day. That is a number that I cannot comprehend, let alone billions. If we divide it up to individuals, look what the individuals now owe. In 1997 every man, woman, and child in this country was responsible for $19,898; 1998, $20,123; 1999, at the end of this fiscal year, they will be responsible for $20,693. That does not include the interest that is being charged on that every year, which is now, I guess, the largest or fast becoming the largest component of the Federal budget at about 17 or 18 percent of the money that we collectively spend of the tax dollars that come in.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Speaker, let me show my colleagues how that plays out. Down here is the President and Vice-President Gore's budget as submitted to the House and the Senate. Here is the budget that was passed, that passed the House. In terms of the effect, the zero line is right here. This is real surplus. This is honest accounting. This is not playing games. I would remind people, this is not my opinion, this is Congressional Budget Office and OMB numbers. All right, so they are not my numbers. If we restrain spending, as the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Gutknecht) just discussed, where we stay within the budget caps that were agreed to in 1997 and that we get our hands off Social Security, what we see is that somewhere right after the year 2000 we start running a real surplus. As a matter of fact, there are people who are projecting this year that because the economy is so good, and because one is paying so much in taxes and that we have restrained spending, that we may have a $6 billion or $7 billion true surplus, real honest non-Washington-based surplus this year. But if we do not restrain spending, and we increase taxes as the President has suggested and we increase programs and we increase spending, look what happens. Under his plan there is no real surplus till 2004. All this in the red below the line and all this in the green below the line goes to our children in debt. Everything above the line, the little bit of red there and the whole bunch of green there, reduces the debt. So we do have a way to take this burden of lack of opportunity for our children away from the future, and that is restraining spending.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Speaker, I wanted to take a few minutes tonight. I know via C-SPAN that this is going to be very hard for the people at home to read but I think it shows a tremendous problem that we have in our foreign policy and how that policy is being carried out. I want to just read it verbatim. What this is is listings taken directly from the U.S. Department of State's 1998 Human Rights Practices Report. The Department of State is required by law to assess human rights violations ongoing in countries that we have dealings with. There are two countries here that are listed, and we have significant involvement, ongoing today, with these two countries. If I may, under country A, this government's human rights record worsened significantly and there were problems in many areas, including extrajudicial killings, murders, disappearances, torture, brutal beatings and arbitrary arrests and detentions. Country B, the government's human rights record deteriorated sharply beginning in the final months of this last year with a crackdown against organized political dissent. Abuses included instances of extrajudicial killings, torture, mistreatment of prisoners, forced confessions, arbitrary arrests and detention, lengthy incommunicado detention and denial of due process. Second area, country A, the government infringed on the citizen's right to privacy. The same thing, country B, the government infringed on the citizen's right to privacy. Number three, under country A, the government severely restricted the freedom of speech and of the press. The same thing, country B, the government continued restrictions on the freedom of speech and of the press. The fourth area of concern, discrimination and violence against women remained serious problems. Discrimination against religious and ethnic minorities worsened during the year. Country B, discrimination against women, minorities and the disabled, violence against women, including coercive family planning practices which sometimes included forced abortion and forced sterilization, prostitution, trafficking in women and children and abuse of children are all significant problems. Fifth area, the government infringed on the freedom of worship by minority religions and restricted freedom of movement. Country B, serious human rights abuses persisted in minority areas where restrictions on religion and other fundamental freedoms intensified. The sixth area, Country A, the police committed numerous serious and systematic human rights abuses. Country B, security police and personnel were responsible for numerous human rights abuses. What kind of countries are these? The first is a constitutional republic, the second is an authoritarian state. Country A happens to be Yugoslavia. Country B happens to be China. We are bombing Yugoslavia as I speak. We are courting China to the World Trade Organization. We give them MFN, most-favored-nation status privileges, in trading with us. Mr. President, Mr. Vice President, I call on you to have some consistency in our foreign policy. The human rights abuses are atrocious for both these countries. Our policy has to be consistent. The Social Security Trust Fund Now I would like to spend some time tonight talking about the problems that really face us. Today we did pass a budget. It is the first honest budget. I have been here, I am in my fifth year. I am a term-limited congressman. I have one year to go. This is the first budget that the Congress of the United States has considered that is honest in comparison with the numbers for the people of this country. It is honest about what our problems are, it is honest about what the real numbers are in terms of money, and it speaks honestly about what our situations are financially. The social security trust fund is a definite problem for us. I think it is important that we understand how it works, because most of the people in my district still think there is real money in a trust fund. That is what it was intended to be, but in fact we have not used it that way, and it has not been done for 40 or 50 years. In fact, the money actually has been taken to use on other programs. What happens now is when we earn a salary, the money that is paid in by our employer or us directly, if we are self-employed, comes to the Federal Government. Excess money coming into social security that is above that which is paid out in social security benefits is used to pay for more spending, or pay off publicly-held debt. We have heard today a lot of people talk about paying off debt. If we pay off publicly-held debt by borrowing money from the social security, we have not changed our debt at all, we have just changed who we owe it to. We also change who is going to be supplying the repayment of that debt. So we put IOUs in the trust fund that bear interest. We are not paying any of that back. As a matter of fact, we are actually creating a larger quantity, and doing so at a greater rate than we ever have in our country's history. In the year 2014, which is the latest, just this last week, the Social Security Administration came out with revised numbers that in the year 2014 there will not be a surplus of payments coming into the social security system. In fact, what that means is the money that will be paid out to benefits, to social security recipients, will exceed the amount of money that the people working are paying into the system. What is going to happen? We are going to have to get the money somewhere, so we are going to either raise taxes or borrow the money by creating additional obligations and reshifting the debt back out of the social security to publicly-held debt. What we are doing, we have the little peanut in the shell game that has been going on for the last 50 years in this country. The budget that was passed today specifically addresses the problems associated with this. All social security trust funds will be moved off-budget and not used for anything except retiring debt: no increased spending, no tax cuts, nothing except reserving them for future use for social security. So you can get an idea of what is actually happening in the social security trust fund balance, the year 1999 is this year. We are going to have about an $80 billion, maybe $90 billion surplus in social security payments in excess of what we are paying out. But as we can see, by the year 2014 what happens is that we start going in the red. We have to borrow money to pay social security, or we have to cut spending somewhere else, or we have to issue new instruments of debt, which is the same thing as borrowing money, or we have to raise taxes. We are going to talk about that in a minute. It is interesting to note a mere 30 years from now we will have $700 billion worth of underpayment in the social security system, $700 billion that we are either going to have to raise the taxes on our children or grandchildren just to meet the obligations for the social security system. By the way, these numbers come from the social security trustees' report. None of these are opinionated numbers made up by a Congressman. They either come from the Office of Management and Budget, the Congressional Budget Office, or social security. So what are our options? There is one fact that is true: In the year 2014, social security will pay out more than it takes in. That has not changed. It has moved one year in the last 2 years. The first thing we can do is save 100 percent of the social security surplus and transition to a system with individually-controlled investments. We can repay the money from the trust fund by raising income taxes on ourselves now, or our children or our grandchildren, or we can delay the date by raising the retirement age or reducing benefits. None of those are of value to anybody that is paying taxes today. They are not of value to our seniors. We have to fulfill our commitment to our seniors. So we only have three options: raise taxes, decrease benefits, or make social security a system that will work. The most interesting thing about social security, had we put the money that was put into our account for social security in a passbook savings account, we would have earned on compounded interest four times what is going to be available to our account under the government's auspices. The average annual interest earnings on social security trust funds is 1.2 percent. Another way of looking at what is going to happen with social security taxes is to look at what the tax rate is now on the employee and employer share. Right now it is 12.5, 12.6 percent that is paid, half of that out of your salary, half out of your employer's salary, or if you are self-employed, you pay it all. We can see the green line shows that that is the rate. If we continue at that same rate, the red line shows what we are going to have to have. So we can see that by the year 2029 we are going to have to go all the way up to 18 percent. We are going to have to have a 50 percent increase in social security taxes, just to meet the demands that are going to be on the system. It is not any wonder that when people are polled in this country, that they have more confidence in the fact that there are UFOs out there than that the social security system will be viable for them. Here is why. If your current age is 5, you have an average life expectancy of 82.5 years. If you earned the average wage in 1998, you would have to live an extra 5.1 years over your expected life expectancy just to get back the money you put in, with interest paid on that. If you earned the maximum, which is $70,000, or $68,400 in 1998, it is higher than that now, you would have to live an extra 14.9 years. Let us say you are 34. Your life expectancy if you are 34 years of age today is 83.8 years, on average. If you earned the average wage during 1998 and you did that for the rest of your working period until you were eligible for social security, you would have to live to be 100.5 years, almost 101 years old to ever get back even what you put into the social security system. If you earn the maximum, $68,000, you have to live to be 172 years old to get your money back out of the social security system. Why? Because the money is not invested properly, it is not achieving daily compound interest, and the money has been spent for things other than what it was intended to. Why is social security important? If we do not fix social security, if we do not quit stealing social security money, if we do not make social security a viable retirement system, our grandchildren will have a much poorer standard of living than what we have today. We are stealing opportunities from our children and our grandchildren by not being responsible over the past 50 years. That is why the budget that passed today was so important. For the first time it recognizes that money for social security is intended to be for social security, and that that money is not intended for tax cuts, that money is not intended for increased spending on anything except social security. Each citizen's share of the debt, in 1997, $19,898; 1998, $20,123; 1999, at the end of this year, September 30th of this year, every person, man, woman, and child in this country, will be responsible for almost $21,000 of debt. More importantly, substitute the politicians' surplus that they have been talking about the last couple of years, and we do not have a real surplus. What we have is an excess payment of social security monies over what is paid out. There is not a true surplus projected until the year 2001. What is happening daily? Every day the debt that our children and grandchildren must repay goes up by $275 million. In 1998, the national debt rose by $120 billion. Yet, the politicians said we had a surplus of $69 billion. Something does not add up. We will never have a surplus until the debt stops rising. That is how you measure a surplus. If the debt is rising, we cannot possibly have a surplus. If any business, any homeowner, any group of individuals managed their books the way the Federal Government manages theirs, first of all they would be going to jail. Number two, if they rob from the pension plan the way the Congress through the years has robbed from the social security plan, they would be in jail already. The most important aspect of putting social security back and building its integrity is the fact that we will start a new process that recognizes that if the Congress makes an obligation to the American people, they have to keep that obligation. It is called truth in budgeting. There is no surplus. There is a politician's surplus. We will talk about that a little bit. Here is what has been publicly said by both the politicians in Congress and the administration about surplus: in 1998, a $69 billion surplus. But how did the national debt go from $5,340 billion to $5,440 billion if we had a surplus? It is because we really did not have a surplus. When we say we have a surplus, then it is easier to spend more of our tax dollars, it is easier to cut taxes because, oh, we have extra money. We have no extra money. As a matter of fact, we owe $1.6 trillion to the social security system now. The money is not there. It has already been spent on something else. When we hear the word ``surplus,'' if we ever encounter that, if we read it in the newspapers, it has to be an on-budget surplus. We use two sets of numbers, one for political purposes, for people to get reelected, and the other that is a real true number that we end up making hard decisions on. The politicians' surplus is a lie. There is not a surplus. If we apply these numbers carefully, we can look at what President Clinton has proposed and the actual spending and what is proposed in this budget, and we can see big differences in the numbers. If we totally exclude social security money from all spending and we keep the budget caps that were agreed to in 1997, that the President and the Congress agreed to, then a couple of things are going to happen. In 1998, if we restrain spending, the real deficit was about $30 billion instead of $69 billion surplus. If we can restrain spending and live within the caps, based on the Congressional Budget Office's projections of what will happen in terms of revenue and costs, what we will see is that we will get a real surplus, a citizens' surplus. More money, we will actually have more money in than we have obligations to meet, not touching any Social Security money. Why is that important? Because in the year 2014 when we have to start paying out this large amount of money to Social Security payments, we are going to have to get that money somewhere. We can do two things. We can borrow the money, which just delays the price of that to a future time, or we can change the system. We can cut the benefits. We can delay the age. We can say one cannot have Social Security until one is 75 and one has to continue to work. The problem with that is we have made a commitment to the American people in terms of the Social Security retirement system. The other problem with it is that the Social Security system today is not a livable retirement wage. So if we want to meet the obligation to the senior citizens of this country, and I am soon to be one, I now have an AARP card I am proud to say, that we have to make the hard choices, we have to be honest about what our budgeting problems are, and we have to keep our hands off Social Security. When I talk to people in my district, I hear lots of worries about creating a system other than the system that we have now that would take a small percentage, say a third of one's Social Security payments, and allow one to put that in a restricted, highly safe investment entity that would earn interest at three or four times the rate that the government is going to earn interest. It is not hard to figure out at compound interest, if the Federal Government is earning 1.2 percent on one's money, and the average private investment vehicle today, discounting the rise in the market the last 6 or 7 years, but pre-1992 was 7 percent, what one is talking about is a fivefold increase in the earnings power of that money. Einstein said the most important scientific fact that he ever looked at powerwise was the power of compound interest, that if one gets paid interest daily on money that one saves, that the building power of that each day that base amount rose and one earns more interest on a higher amount each day, eventually what one will achieve is a marked reduction in the cost for any service that one would offer. This ability to restrain spending, to stay within the caps is the most important thing that Congress can do. The budget that we passed today does exactly that. It preserves 100 percent of the Social Security funds for Social Security. Number two, it restrains spending by staying within the budget caps agreed to between the President and the Congress in 1997. We cannot do anything any more important than that for our children and our grandchildren. Part of being a Member of Congress is helping us fulfill our obligations, not just to our seniors, but fulfilling the obligations that we have to our children and the future generations that come after us. I want to use an example. This is not meant to be a partisan example, but it tells very specifically what happened in 1998 with the supposed ``surplus,'' but really spending the Social Security surplus. We had $127 billion more come into the budget in 1999 on Social Security than we actually paid out. Correction. That is, 1999 was projected to be $127 billion. We have agreed to spend $1 billion, or we think we have agreed because it is in conference now, in terms of the emergency spending bill, in terms of all of the tragedies that happened in South America. That brings us to $126 billion. We had a bill that spent an additional $15 billion at the end of last year outside of the caps that we had agreed to. So that brought it down to $111 billion. We had another billion dollars that was spent in agreement with the President in emergency appropriations. So last year we stole $17 billion of the Social Security surplus straight off the top. What is going to happen this year, the expected surplus is $138 billion in Social Security. The surplus for the general accounts is not near that. It is at actually a deficit. If we do not accomplish what we said we would with this budget today, what will happen is we will be using Social Security money again to pay for things that we should be paying for with things other than Social Security dollars. We will be undermining the Social Security system. We will not be honest about what we are doing here. We will have two sets of numbers again, one for the American people when we are campaigning and being politicians and trying to look good, and another that is the real world that someday we are going to have a day of reckoning when it comes to our kids. The President put forth the budget that said, over the next 15 years, we spend only 38 percent of the Social Security surplus when we should not spend any of it. But even under his budget for the year 2000, he actually spends 42 percent of it on increased programs within the Federal Government. Let us not spend any of the Social Security money. Another thing has struck me since I have been in Congress. I am a physician, obstetrician, family practice doctor. I delivered 97 babies last year while I was in Congress. So I go home every weekend. On Mondays, I still practice medicine, lots of times on Fridays, and every fourth weekend I am on call. So I get to talk to people about real problems, see the real issues that they are involved in. It strikes me so peculiar that we talk so easy about these large numbers. The application is, when I have a senior citizen in my office, and they are not taking their medicine, and the reason they are not taking their medicine is because they cannot afford to take their medicine, that they are choosing between eating and taking the medicine that will extend their lives, that we have failed as a Nation under, quote, Social Security and Medicare to provide the things that we promised that we would provide. The other thing that strikes me is that we heard the gentleman from North Carolina earlier say that the reason that we had this huge deficit was tax cuts in the future. We have two ways of affecting government funds. We can either spend more or less, that is one way, or we can raise taxes or lower taxes. It is one or the other. One is not better than the other when it comes to balancing our books. If in fact we need to cut spending, we can. I cannot find one person in my district who thinks that the Federal Government is efficient; that it could not be. As a matter of fact, if one knows anything about the history of World War II, when this country had to improve efficiency, when we had a crisis that faced us, what we did is markedly reduce the cost of the bureaucracy of the Federal Government so that more dollars went into our ability to sustain the freedom that we all cherish. We have that big of a crisis facing us today. It is not flashy. It is not great big. It is not in front of us all the time. But the fact is, is our children and our grandchildren, unless we have fiscal discipline, will have a markedly lower standard of living. We do not have any option to that except doing the right thing now. I am going to close here in a minute. One of the things that I have learned in my short stint as a politician is that there is a lot of ways to look at things. There is a way to look at things if one wants to get reelected. There is a way to look at things if one wants to play ball up here with the politicians. There is a way to look at things if one wants to be able to sleep at night. Martin Luther King in his last speech at the National Cathedral, his last major speech, said this: Cowardice asked the question, is it expedient? Vanity asked the question, is it popular? But conscience asked the question, is it right? It is not right to steal Social Security money and use it in other things. It is not right to be dishonest with the American public about the budget numbers that we deal with every day. It is not right to be untruthful about our situation in Yugoslavia or our trading relationships with China. They are equivalently the same in terms of the way they treat humans. They are both atrocious. We have to live with ourselves. We have to demand the integrity and the statesmanship that is necessary for our freedom to operate. As we spend more of one's money and we do not fulfill our obligations, we all lose freedom. I want freedom for my grandchildren. I want freedom for my children. I have three daughters, two sons-in- law, two grandchildren. My greatest dream is that they will have the opportunity to be free and succeed in a free society. That requires integrity in the Congress and requires integrity at every level in this government. We can become much more efficient. We can do the right things. We do not have to always be popular. We do not have to look for the expedient way. That is the way of the coward.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Chairman, may I inquire as to how much time is remaining?

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, I would just like to make a note that, last year, NIH was increased 14.5 percent in our budget. I would also like to make a note that WIC is not in the category that the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Bentsen) just referred to and is not at risk at all under this budget. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Stearns). (Mr. STEARNS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Chairman, may I inquire as to the time remaining on both sides?

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Shadegg). (Mr. SHADEGG asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Chairman, I yield 30 seconds to the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Latham).

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Chairman, it is important that the President's proposals be put forward. It is important to contrast what was stated in the State of the Union with the actual numbers coming through in his budget. It is important for us to give his budget a comparison to the other budgets on this floor. It is important for us all to remember that, while he is saying he is saving Medicare, he cuts it $1 billion this year, $11 billion over the next 5 years. While it is important that he says he is saving Social Security, he spends all but 58 percent of it this next year and all but 62 percent of it the next 4 years. Vice President Gore, in the Clinton-Gore budget, one of the things that he said in his book, and I quote from Earth and Balance, ``Look at the budget where we are borrowing a billion dollars every 24 hours and in the process endangering the future of our children. Yet nobody is doing anything about it.'' Well, I would propose to my colleagues that the Clinton-Gore budget does nothing about that, that in fact it increases the debt on our children $1.5 trillion between now and the year 2005. It runs a budget deficit of $663 billion over the next 5 years. The budget of the majority runs a surplus. If this vision for America is appealing to my colleagues, higher taxes, more debt for our grandchildren, stealing money from Social Security, cuts in Medicare, then I would encourage them to support my resolution which is the Clinton-Gore budget and vote for it. But if they want to begin easing the debt burden on our grandchildren, save 100 percent of the Social Security trust fund surplus and actually increase spending for Medicare, then I encourage them to oppose my amendment.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. COBURN. Point of order, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, our staff was in contact with one Elizabeth Gore and outlined our plans. She had no objections to the assumptions that we made on that. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Gutknecht).

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, the reason I am offering this amendment is because millions of dollars and nearly 1,000 people in the executive branch spent time preparing this budget. The President spoke in his State of the Union speech. He outlined the plans that he would submit. The reason I am offering this budget is because it is fair to the President to debate his issues. It is ironic that nobody from his party would submit his budget. There is no question I have great disagreements with many aspects of the budget, but the American people deserve to hear his budget outlined as scored by the CBO, as every other budget that will be presented on this floor, and what it actually says, because it is my contention that the budget that is presented does not go along with what the President said in his State of the Union speech. I hope through this discussion and with the ranking member of the Committee on the Budget, that we will find out where that is. There is no intention to deceive anybody. It is an honest and sincere desire to make sure that this budget is considered. But I think it is also implicit on us to use the same scoring mechanisms, assuming all the assumptions in his budget, that we would do that. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. COBURN. To speak in favor of my amendment, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment in the nature of a substitute.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Minge).

Mr. COBURN. I believe the discussion is to be focused on the amendment at hand. The amendment at hand is the President's budget.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Armey).

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Chairman, may I inquire of the time on each side?

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Shadegg).

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, I would just make mention of the fact that, in this budget, there are no specific targeted tax cuts for anyone. To continue to speak on this House floor about tax cuts for rich people, which is not our intention in the first place, but to say that is erroneous. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Hostettler). (Mr. HOSTETTLER asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 2 minutes. Mr. Chairman, I think it is very important that the gentleman raised the Medicare issue. Because, in fact, the statements of the President in his State of the Union do not match the budget, and that is one of the reasons his budget needs to be compared to. As a physician who cares for Medicare patients, let me tell my colleagues what the President's budget does for Medicare. It freezes inpatient hospital payments. That is the first thing it does. So what that is going to do is shift the cost for everybody that is not Medicare, raise their cost for health care. So it is an indirect tax on everybody else in the country. The second thing it does is it reduces laboratory services payments. They are all making a ton of money. It reduces prices paid for durable medical equipment, which has already been reduced by about 50 percent over the last 5 years. It imposes $194 million next year, $970 million over 5 years, and $1.94 billion over 10 years in new user fees on Medicare. We cannot get doctors to care for a lot of our Medicare patients. Now we are going to charge them something every year if they are going to be a Medicare provider. We now are having trouble getting HMO firms to give care under the Medicare Plus Choice Plan. He has a charge, a tax on everybody that is a provider in a Medicare Plus Choice Plan. So as we go through the things that the President said he wants to help save Medicare, in fact it is very, very different from that. There is a total cut of $3.3 billion in Medicare, according to the CBO, over the next 10 years. This next year $1 billion is cut from Medicare by President Clinton through these and other things. That is not to mention the reduction in drug payments. The whole Medicare Commission failed over the fight over prescription drug benefits. And yet in his budget that he submits, which I am submitting so we can debate it, he cuts the Medicare prescription benefit that is out there. He cuts the drug payment for cancer drugs to keep people alive that are on Medicare. So it is important that we talk about what is really in the President's budget. I understand why it was not offered, but it is still very important that we discuss what is in the budget.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Toomey).