Jim Greenwood

Mr. GREENWOOD

Mr. GREENWOOD. If the gentleman will yield, the option that would be very attractive for the constituent in your district that you just have described would be a managed care option. Most of the managed care companies have told us that, and they are already doing this in many areas of the country, that they will offer managed care plans in which there is no requirement whatsoever to pay Medigap insurance. So that $1,000 a year that she may be paying now toward her Medigap insurance would disappear. Suddenly she would gain new benefits. She would probably gain a prescription drug benefit. She may get an improved dental or vision benefit. She would no longer have that out-of-pocket cost at all and still be able to go to her doctors within her network whenever she chooses. She would, I think, would welcome this change very much and be far better off and have more money left over in her budget at the end of each month.

Mr. GREENWOOD. The fact of the matter is 9 percent of seniors in this country already have chosen the option of receiving their Medicare benefits through managed care. That number is growing rapidly because you know how seniors will get together and talk and compare notes, and when one learns from the other that they have a new prescription drug program benefit, they say, ``How do I get that,'' and they make the choice. One of the things about this debate that has been interesting to me is you and I and Members of this side of the aisle know our friends on the other side of the aisle will spend all day, as they have spent the last 6 or 7 months, scaring senior citizens that all of these terrible things are going to befall them. The fact of the matter is that we are confident today, we are confident because we know when the political dust settles, when this plan is finally signed into law, that the senior citizens will then, beginning in January, have these new options. They will see, my goodness, their copays did not go up, deductibles did not go up, their Social Security check, even with part B deduction, is bigger than it was this year. They will then thank us. Once this debate is over, we think we will be able to say we told you so.

Mr. GREENWOOD. Absolutely. That is the beauty part. We have made certain from day one there is the fee-for-service option will always be available to every single senior citizen in America that wants to keep it. Those that may be a little too old for change, do not like to change, can keep their fee-for-service and enjoy the kind of Medicare that they have grown to enjoy these past years.

Mr. GREENWOOD

Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Speaker, earlier this evening the gentleman from California, Mr. Fazio, made the statement that the Republicans do not want Americans to fully understand our Medicare reform bill. I would like to challenge that assertion because in fact it has been our experience and my personal experience that what we need to do is precisely make sure that Americans, particularly America's senior citizens, understand our Medicare present reform bill. When they do, they like it. And they like it very much. That has been my experience. It was my experience this evening. I had a letter that one of my staff members placed on my desk from a 70-year- old gentleman in my district that was very upset. He had been listening to my friends on this side of the aisle. He said he was having a hard time sleeping because he and his wife had been in and out of hospital. He heard we were going to take his Medicare away. So I said to him, let us go through it one step at a time. And I said, do you like your Medicare just as it is? He said, yes, I am very happy with it. I said, well, under our plan, you will keep your fee-for-service Medicare just as it is. And you and your wife will be able to go into the hospital and go to the doctors next year and the year after that and the year after that just as you have been now. In fact we are going to make sure that the system is there for you. I said, we are not going to raise your deductibles. Oh, you are not? No, we are not. We are not going to raise your co-pays. You are not? I heard them say that you are. Well, we are not. What are you going to raise? Are you going to raise the portion that I pay for my part B? I said, no, we are not going to raise the portion that you pay. You pay 31.5 percent now. And you will pay 31.5 percent next year. And your friends and neighbors will pick up the other 68.5 percent next year just as they have this year. I said that 31.5 percent is going to go up a little bit just as it did last year, the year before that. But your COLA's, your Social Security COLA will go up by even more than that, so your Social Security check that you receive next January will be bigger than the Social Security check that you are receiving now and will receive through the end of the this year. So you are going to have more money in your pocket at the end of the day next year, when this plan takes effect, and exactly the same health care that you chose now. We find that, when we go to focus groups, when we go to town meetings and we explain in detail this plan, the senior citizens thank us. They like it. They have nothing to fear and they know it. And if they do not know it now, they certainly will know it once the President signs the bill and it goes into effect. Let me talk about some of the disinformation that has been difficult for us to deal with. Members of the minority party have stood up all night, and they stood up for weeks and weeks and weeks, and talked about Medicare cuts, and, as we have said over and over again, no one is going to cut Medicare. We are going to increase the expenditures per capita on Medicare beneficiaries by 40 percent over the next 7 years. That is a whopping increase, it is a generous increase, and it is more than enough money to restore and preserve the system and continue the same benefits package. So we do want Americans to understand that because when Americans understand that and they understand that we are going to spend more on them in each of the next 7 years, and not less, the are comforted, and they need to be comforted because they have been told a lot of falsehoods. We have heard people say from the other side that we are going to take away. One of the gentlewomen from the other side of the aisle said, ``cutting health care,'' cutting health care as if a single senior citizen in this country would not have access to exactly the same health care services when our plan is in effect as it is now. Simply not true. Every senior citizen in this country will be able to stay in the fee-for-service program and get precisely the same health care benefit next year as they do this year. Now, that is an indisputable fact that is not even subject to debate, and yet I hear Members from the other side of the aisle over and over again talk about cutting health care. I walked past the sort of ginned- up candlelight vigil outside the Capitol tonight, and I heard the minority leader of this House, the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Gephardt], talk about Republicans doing away with Medicare, and I shook my head. I shook my head and thought how could a Member of the U.S. Congress utter those words knowing deep in his heart that no one in this body would ever contemplate for a moment doing that. Certainly, this Member, whose mother and father he deeply loves and whose mother and father are Medicare recipients, would never do anything to reduce their package, their benefits. We have heard [[Page H 10292]] over and over again the talk about forcing seniors into managed care, forcing seniors into managed care. We do not do that. What we do is we preserve the system. We preserve it not only for this generation but the next, and I hope we all vote for it tomorrow.

Mr. GREENWOOD

Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Speaker, on rollcall vote No. 704, it was my intention to vote ``no''. I was in the Commerce Committee's Medicare markup, and in my haste, I misconstrued the intent of the Roemer amendment. I ask unanimous consent that my statement appear in the Record immediately following rollcall vote No. 704.

Mr. GREENWOOD

Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Speaker, it is even worse than that. I will get to that in 1 minute, however, Mr. Norwood. What happened was, we then consulted with the lawyers and with the Capitol Police and said, well, what do we do if when this meeting comes to order a group comes forward and just is disruptive and refuses to abide by the rules of the House? We were told there is a procedure. The procedure is the chairman should ask the parties if they would please have a seat in one of the seats where the rest of the public sits, because this was a markup where we amend the bill. Then the next procedure, if they refuse to do that, is to recess the committee and everyone is to leave the room, including Members of Congress, and then the Capitol Police come in and clear the room. So we said, we hope this does not happen, but if it does, we will do that. We sat down, the chairman banged the gavel, and immediately, if you remember, immediately, on cue, a woman who was formerly the full- time paid political relations director for this seniors citizens group, the senior citizens group, by the way, which last year received in excess of $70 million in Federal funds, something like 99 percent of all its funds were Federal funds, she got up with her script, went around to the front of the room, and reading her script began to scream at the chairman. Mr. Speaker, she did not want to be heard. She did not have a message. She did not want to listen or have a dialogue or have a conversation. She just wanted to scream and scream and scream.

Mr. GREENWOOD. The motivation is a political agenda, of course. And that is, as we all know, after 40 years of the Democrats controlling the House. Republicans were elected in the last election, and I think we were elected, frankly, because the country finally said a $5 trillion deficit is serious. A Medicare program spending at inflation rates that are unsustainable is serious. We have to elect a team that is ready to go in and deal with that. We are dealing with it. It is a big change for the country. The party that is out now wants to come back in, and if it takes cheap political theater to do it, they will. Mr. Speaker, the worst of what was done was they used political props. The political props were people. They were little old ladies, many in wheelchairs, whom the young professional staff wheeled up to the front of the room for the TV cameras and turned them just right for the TV. I do not think these little old ladies knew where they were, some of them were that frail, and then the paid professionals left the room so they would not get in the camera's view. We all left the room, the public left the room, and six times the Capitol Police said to the ladies and gentlemen, ``Please, you really need to leave. You cannot interrupt a committee of Congress in session.'' They refused, because they wanted to be arrested, and, ultimately, they were. Then, act two of this very bad political theater was acted out on the floor of the House tonight, where Member after Member stood up and pretended that this was somehow a spontaneous event in which just average citizens came forward and wanted to be heard and could not. Mr. Speaker, it was political guerrilla warfare, and I hope for the sake of the country, and I hope for the sake of the Medicare program that the vast majority of Americans watching tonight and watching this play out can see through it, and see it for the desperate, cheap political theater that it is.

Mr. GREENWOOD. I sure will.

Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from Kansas, and each of the gentlemen for participating in this and organizing this special order on Medicare. I, with Mr. Norwood, sit on the Committee on Commerce, and together, before the hour is out, we will get into a lot of details, hopefully, about Medicare, but I really want to comment about the previous hour and about yesterday's activities, because I have been sitting in my office just boiling over what we have heard from some of the Democrats. Mr. Speaker, for the past hour, from I guess about eight o'clock to nine o'clock, we had some very entertaining theater on the part of the Democrats. If there were not so much at stake, I guess the American people might shrug this off as bad theater. But the fact is there is a great deal at stake, and what is at stake is something no less precious than the health of our country's elderly. Members of Congress are not elected to be entertainers. They are not elected to be actors. But it looks like when [[Page H 10042]] some Members of Congress cannot accept reality, they figure out how to escape reality and create their own reality by creating their own theater. That is what happened yesterday and today in Washington. Mr. Speaker, Mr. Norwood and I went to our Committee on Commerce meeting scheduled to begin at 10 o'clock. The meeting finally did come to order, and it went until way after midnight, while we took amendment after amendment after amendment on the Medicare bill from the Democrats. But when we got there, the lawyers for the committee informed us that they had been informed that a group of protestors was planning to disrupt the meeting and that they would not leave unless they were handcuffed and arrested. They did that precisely because they wanted to create for the television cameras a visual image of senior citizens being arrested so that somehow that would reflect on the Medicaid bill.

Mr. GREENWOOD. Unfortunately, it was anything but that. It was political theater. It was scripted. It was planned. It is sort of the latest in political guerilla warfare. You create a media event that works for you on television.

Mr. GREENWOOD. That is correct.

Mr. GREENWOOD. I appreciate the gentleman for commenting about that. I was sitting in my office listening to this absurd, sort of UFO show about what happened yesterday. And I said, I have got to go down to the House and straighten this out. They are telling the Americans things that are just not so. So I took the microphone. I said, we are going to have an hour between 9 and 10. And how about if instead of Democrats doing an hour and have things their way and then the Republicans do an hour and have things our way, why do we not share time and we can have a dialogue back and forth and maybe the American people who are paying for this might actually learn something instead of getting the propaganda approach. I asked for some time and they refused. They yielded me 15 seconds, which was enough to make the request, and then they said they would not do it. The issue is, why are they so desperate. And the fact, if you look back just a few weeks, after we had 38 hearings in the Committee on Ways and Means on Medicare, another 10 hearings in the Committee on Commerce, 48 hearings on Medicare, countless hours of hearings, we then said, now it is time. We heard from all the senior citizens groups, all the professionals, all the experts, it is time to do the hard work of drafting the bill. While we were doing that, day after day, sometimes until 2 o'clock in the morning, crafting the bill, the same folks we just heard from were coming down here and telling you, I will tell you what the Republican bill is going to do. It is going to raise the cost of Medicare thousands of dollars for senior citizens. And then they are going to raise their co-pays. Then they are going to raise the deductibles. Then they are going to push them into managed care. Then they are going to lower the quality of care and take benefits away from them. And we would have press conference after press conference. And the Democrats would say, wait until you see this horrendous plan. We quietly, carefully went to work putting together a plan that, as has been said, does not raise the cost of Medicare for anyone. Co- payments are the same; deductibles are the same, still pay 31 percent of the premium in part D. Taxpayers pick up the rest. Benefits package is exactly the same. If you want to stay where you are, you can stay where you are. New opportunities in managed care and Medisave accounts. So we got the bill all put together very carefully and introduced it, and the Democratic staff took it and looked at it. And I could just see the Democrats huddling around and saying, OK, all that bad stuff is in here, right? All those horrible things we said they are going to do to seniors, tell us what to say. And the analysts must have said, well, they did not do that. They did not do those terrible things. So now what are we going to do? The Democrats say, what are we going to do? We have to destroy their plan because if we do not destroy their plan, they will succeed and they will save Medicare and they might get reelected or something and we will not take the House back. So what do they have left? Cheap political desperate theatrics. If Americans fall for that, if Americans cannot see through that kind of ridiculous, childish, adolescent behavior, this country is in trouble. But I do not think it is.

Mr. GREENWOOD. That is the thing that has been so astonishing is the comment that somehow we have not been listening to the seniors on this. I know I have had meeting after meeting after meeting with seniors in all the senior centers. I have had big town meetings for the whole county to come. I have had a senior citizen advisory committee, and despite the fact there is this constant barrage of scare tactics coming out of Washington, we call it ``Mediscare,'' the Democratic Party had a great leader who said, ``We have nothing to fear but fear itself.'' Now we are seeing that they have nothing to offer but fear itself. That is a pretty sad state of affairs. Despite all the fear-mongering that is going on, everytime I have been able to take our bill and sit down with senior citizens one at a time, five at a time, 200 at a time and walk through what we are offering, they all go, ``Oh, that sounds great. You mean I can stay where I am, and you guys are not going to cut Medicare?'' They keep saying, ``You are going to cut Medicare.'' The chart shows we are not going to cut Medicare. We are going to increase the expenditures for the average citizen from over $4,800 a year where it is now over the 7 years to $6,700 a year plus for a senior citizen. That is a lot of money. That will buy a lot of health care. That is a 40-percent increase. What we are not going to do is we are not going to continue to waste money in the program, so the inflation rate is 10 percent a year. If we can hold the inflation rate to 5 percent a year, every senior citizen in the country knows what 5 percent a year, they would like to get that on the CD's back home after all these years. Five percent is a pretty good inflation rate. That is plenty of money. The theory the other folks keep putting out, you know, if I find a television for sale for $500 and it is in one store, I go to another store, it is $400, I guess I ought to spend $500 for the same TV; otherwise, I am getting cheated out of $100. I think seniors are better shoppers than that.

Mr. GREENWOOD. If I may, what will happen, the Medicare program would pay a figure, let us say $5,000, for each senior citizen in that community right to the hospital and doctor network. That would be, we would basically be paying the insurance premium for that. In exchange for that, the hospitals and doctors and surgeons and specialist say, ``We will meet all the health care needs of the seniors who sign up in our program.'' It is a great idea. It is innovative. You know, the hospitals and doctors like it because they leave the insurance companies out of the deal and save some money that way for them. The insurance companies are not wild about it, but it makes it competitive.

Mr. GREENWOOD. No. it is probably going to save them money. My mom and dad have chosen in our area, where we have managed care programs already, they have chosen to obtain their Medicare benefits through the managed care program. You know what happened to them, they are saving a thousand dollars each a year because they do not have to buy the Medigap policy anymore. They have got a prescription drug program now which seniors know in regular Medicare you do not get, and they have no copays and no deductibles; it is a great deal for them. They like it. They are happy there, and there is going to be an opportunity for seniors, and the other great thing is that we are setting this thing up so the seniors can get into the kind of plan, try it out, if they are happy and love it and their doctors are the best doctors in the community, great. If they decide they do not like it, in any given month----

Mr. GREENWOOD. They can just walk out and go back to Medicare.

Mr. GREENWOOD. Yes. What we are doing, we are increasing between 5 and 10 percent the financial incentives for the managed care companies to go and aggressively market their product. So what they will be doing is going to the senior centers, advertising on television, saying, ``If you come to our plan, get your Medicare through us, we will get you a prescription drug program with maybe a $2 copay. If you come to ours, we will give a membership in the gym.'' It will be very competitive.

Mr. GREENWOOD. The bill raises significantly the penalties for any health care producer that is guilty of fraud. We are going to involve the patients, as the gentleman from Georgia [Mr. Norwood] said, because what the Medicare beneficiary gets to do is look at the bill and the Secretary of Health and Human Services is directed to set up a system whereby if the senior finds out that there has been fraud or abuse in the bill, gets to share in it and proves it, and there is a rebate, gets to share in the profits or in the differences. But what is more important really here is you cannot depend on the Federal bureaucracy to weed out, to look at every single doctor bill for 37 million Americans. As Americans seniors move into these managed care companies, then all of a sudden the managed care companies have a real financial incentive to find the waste, fraud and abuse. If they do not, it is out of their pocket, not Uncle Sam's pocket.

Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Speaker, a very important point has to be made here. If we recall in the first 100 days of this Congress, the first three months-plus, we paid for those tax reductions. The way we did it is we reduced by $180 billion over the next seven years the discretionary spending for all of the Federal bureaucracies. That was hard. We made the tough choices, and that is how we funded the tax reduction for the families and so forth. Then, on top of that, we reduced the cost to the Federal Government of the welfare program in our welfare reform bill. Putting people back to work and making them less dependent, we saved another $80 billion. We saved every penny which we planned to offer back to the American people in tax reductions.

Mr. GREENWOOD. Absolutely not. The Medicare Part A, the hospitalization, the bigger piece of the pie, is already paid for by wages, a tax paid by employers and employees. Well, today we are in okay shape, because we are going to spend less money today, in October of 1995, than we are going to take in. But beginning next year, we start to spend more than that tax takes in. In seven years, we are out of money. So if we do nothing, even if we do not have the tax break, that does not solve the problem.

Mr. GREENWOOD. That is absolutely correct. I think most of those young families want that tax reduction and need it. This will be the final thing I will say tonight. There are some Americans out there who say ``I am not taxed enough. You ought to tax me more, Congress.'' My answer to them is write a check, put it in an envelope, make it out to the United States Treasury, and send it in. If you do not feel you are paying enough, send some more in. A lot of families are struggling and need help.

Mr. GREENWOOD

Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Speaker, would the gentlewoman yield 1 minute?

Mr. GREENWOOD. My recommendation, and I have done this before, is instead of having the taxpayers pay for an hour of one side of the issues is to engage in debate, to have an actual discussion. The facts presented about the arrest yesterday, if one iota of what has been said tonight was true, we would be joined together. The fact of the matter is, it is completely untrue. If we would share time over the next hour and a half, Americans could learn the truth. If my colleagues do not want to share time, it is sort of like saying they do not want the truth to be known.

Mr. GREENWOOD. If the gentlewoman would just yield for 15 seconds.

Mr. GREENWOOD

Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.