
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, August 9, 1995                   TAG: 9508090032
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: CAL THOMAS
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

PRESCRIPTION FOR CHANGE

THIRTY YEARS after Congress passed and President Johnson signed the act creating Medicare, government-backed health care is being hailed by its supporters as a savior for the elderly. In fact, Medicare was conceived in a lie, imposing a heavy burden on taxpayers and contributing to the generational warfare that may soon produce ugly fruit.

Medicare's roots are in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. In the early '60, Americans for Democratic Action tried to persuade President Kennedy to back the King-Anderson bill - the legislation authorizing Medicare - against the opposition of the American Medical Association. Kennedy's heart wasn't in it and the bill never passed the Democratic Congress. Following Kennedy's assassination, President Johnson told the nation that King-Anderson was a dream of Kennedy's and the bill should be passed to honor the martyred president.

Addressing concerns that ``socialized medicine'' would cost too much, Democratic Sen. Hubert Humphrey promised that once King-Anderson passed, health insurance premiums for those under 65 would be cheaper. Few prophecies have been as soundly repudiated by subsequent experience. In addition, according to former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, administrative costs of the Medicare system now account for 26 percent of our current health bill.

As former AMA President Dr. Edward Annis writes in his book, ``Code Blue,'' ``Once people were no longer responsible for their own bills and once the federal government held out billions of dollars for the taking, our caring medical profession would become an insensitive business.''

But wasn't one of the objectives of Medicare to help the elderly and protect them against greedy doctors? No, writes Annis: ``The notion that greedy doctors were fighting King-Anderson because they would make less money became a recurring theme in the unions' campaign to smear the profession. But, in fact, doctors at that time were treating the needy without charge. After that I made it a point to predict that if King-Anderson became law, doctors' incomes would rise - and that is exactly what happened.''

Even those celebrating Medicare's anniversary acknowledge the need for radical reform. The president's own task force agrees that without reform, Medicare will be bankrupt in seven years.

But Democrats are doing nothing to fix it, preferring, as the president did last week, to follow the path of demagoguery. ``I'm not going to let them take away your Medicare,'' the president told a partisan group of seniors and congressional Democrats.

Among those proposing serious and reality-based change is United Seniors Association. In conjunction with the American Medical Association and The Heritage Foundation, United Seniors has issued a reform proposal that would prohibit tax increases, limit Medicare premium increases for seniors and Medicare general revenue ``contributions,'' delay the retirement age, give control over Medicare funds directly to the elderly, alter the Medicare benefits package and change Individual Retirement Accounts to allow their use for medical expenses.

Just how desperate the situation is can be seen in the numbers. The cost of Medicare doubled from $3.4 billion in 1966 to $7.2 billion in 1970 and doubled again by 1975. It more than doubled again by 1980 ($35 billion) and now costs $181.5 billion with no end of this rise in sight. Even under the proposed Republican plan, Medicare spending would increase by another $178 billion to $274 billion by 2002. Without the cuts, Medicare spending would increase by nearly half a trillion dollars.

Annis saw all of this coming. ``Seemingly before Lyndon Johnson's signature had time to dry on the new legislation,'' he writes, ``Walter Reuther stood before the American Public Health Association in November of 1968 at Detroit and proclaimed a health-care crisis in America, blaming private medicine for escalating costs. He demanded complete federal financing of health care for all Americans to be administered by the federal bureaucracy. ... '' Annis says the media contributed to the ``smear campaign'' against the medical profession and the fix was in.

In his speech last week, President Clinton invoked the memory of Harry Truman, in whose presence Lyndon Johnson signed King-Anderson. But Truman let a similar measure die in Congress just as John Kennedy did.

Newt Gingrich has challenged the president to put up or shut up on Medicare. The Republican Congress must not shrink from true reform of a system that is headed for destruction no matter how much the Democrats lie about Medicare's past, present and future.

- Los Angeles Times Syndicate

by CNB