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Updated: June 29, 2025
I propose catastrophic health insurance for everybody covered by Medicare. To finance this added protection, fees for short-term care will go up somewhat, but nobody after reaching age 65 will have to pay more than $500 a year for covered hospital or nursing home care, nor more than $250 for 1 year's doctor bills.
Taken together, these proposals would mark the largest investment in health care in the 35 years since the creation of Medicare a big step toward assuring health care for all Americans, young and old. We must also make investments that reward work and support families.
Whatever our differences, we should balance the budget now, and then, for the long-term health of our society, we must agree to a bipartisan process to preserve Social Security and reform Medicare for the long run, so that these fundamental programs will be as strong for our children as they are for our parents. And let me say something that's not in my script tonight.
We should extend Medicare benefits that are now denied to 1,300,000 permanently and totally disabled Americans under 65 years of age. We should improve the process of democracy by passing our election reform and financing proposals, by tightening our laws regulating lobbying, and by restoring a reasonable franchise to Americans who move their residences.
To those who would cut Medicare without protecting seniors, I say the solution to today's squeeze on middle class working people's health care is not to put the squeeze on middle class retired people's health care. We can do better than that. When it's all said and done, it's pretty simple to me. Insurance ought to mean what it used to mean.
Lloyd Bentsen, you have served America well. Beyond paying off the debt, we must ensure that the benefits of debt reduction go to preserving two of the most important guarantees we make to every American Social Security and Medicare.
It doesn't have a lick to do with party. They think we don't get it, and it's time we show that we do get it. From the day we began, our health care initiative has been designed to strengthen what is good about our health care system the world's best health care professionals, cutting edge research, and wonderful research institutions, Medicare for older Americans.
Another example is Medicare and Medicaid programs with worthy goals but whose costs have increased from 11.2 billion to almost 60 billion, more than 5 times as much, in just 10 years. Waste and fraud are serious problems. Back in 1980 Federal investigators testified before one of your committees that "corruption has permeated virtually every area of the Medicare and Medicaid health care industry."
I want to emphasize, however, that its full details will have been worked out only after close consultation with congressional, State, and local officials. Starting in fiscal 1984, the Federal Government will assume full responsibility for the cost of the rapidly growing Medicaid program to go along with its existing responsibility for Medicare.
I am carrying out their recommendations in this year's budget. This budget, therefore, for the first time accurately covers all Federal expenditures and all Federal receipts, including for the first time in one budget $47 billion from the social security, Medicare, highway, and other trust funds.
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