WASHINGTON – U.S. Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, and ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, today made the following statement on the floor of the House on H.R. 3631, which would eliminate premium increases for Medicare Part B next year.

“Mr. Speaker, we are here today because the Democratic leadership apparently doesn’t know what our senior citizens have known for the last six months. I held a town hall meeting in Wortham, Texas, in August. The population of Wortham, Texas, is approximately 1,100 people perhaps. A constituent, a senior citizen, stood up at my town hall meeting and asked me if it was true that their Medicare Part B premiums were going to go up when the Social Security COLA did not increase. And I said I did not know but I would check it out. I had my staff check it out and sure enough, they were telling the truth.

“Well, yesterday right before the Energy and Commerce Committee markup was scheduled to conclude, I got a note from my staff that there was going to be a special meeting of the Rules Committee last evening and that we were going to have a same-day rule and have an emergency bill put on the floor today to hold harmless our senior citizens who choose Medicare Part B and who are having their premiums go up. I asked the distinguished subcommittee chairman, Mr. Pallone, if he knew anything about it and to his credit he said he was aware of it but that he had just become aware of it. I said, well, why didn’t we have a hearing on this? Why didn’t we have a markup? Why didn’t we find out what the policy is? Why didn’t we do all kinds of things? To his credit, his answer was that it was just something that had to be done.

“Mr. Speaker, I’m tired of the Democratic leadership waiting until the last moment. To give them the benefit of the doubt, they don’t know what’s happening in these programs so they have to scramble, or they do know and they don’t give a darn about what the process is and the policy is. I think it’s inexcusable that we’re here on the House floor today on a bill there’s no serious opposition that we need to do something, but I think there is a real policy debate about how to prevent this from happening again in the future.

“For my friends who don’t know a lot about Medicare Part B, Medicare Part B is voluntary. It is the part of Medicare that handles physician payments and outpatient reimbursement. Now most Medicare recipients choose Part B, about 98 percent choose Part B. Within Part B there are four classes of Medicare beneficiaries. There are Medicare beneficiaries that have a high income. There are Medicare beneficiaries that have average incomes and there are Medicare beneficiaries that have low incomes. Under current law, if you have been covered by Medicare in a prior year, and you don’t have a high income, you don’t have a low income, you are held harmless by the current law. But if you’re a new Medicare beneficiary, in other words you weren’t on the program last year, if you’re a high-income Medicare beneficiary or if you’re a low-income Medicare beneficiary, then you’re not held harmless and those groups, about 25 percent of the Medicare population, are the people who are going to have their Medicare premium increased. The current premium this year is about $96 and under current law, if you weren’t protected, it would go up to about $104, an $8 increase or a little over maybe seven or eight percent.

“Under years when the average inflation, the Consumer Price Index goes up, there’s a Social Security COLA increase. So as Medicare expenses go up, which they did last year, the Medicare Part B premium goes up, but the Social Security benefit goes up and since Medicare Part B premiums are deducted directly from Social Security, then that is offset. But this year we didn’t have inflation. The Consumer Price Index, because of the recession, didn’t go up so our seniors didn’t get their Social Security increase. But Medicare spending went up last year because we haven’t reformed the program and so the Medicare Part B premium, which is optional, went up and if you weren’t protected, your premiums went up.

“Mr. Speaker, there are lots of policy questions there. Did we have that hearing? Did we have that policy debate? No! The Democratic majority is simply putting this bill on the floor, saying, let’s take $2.7 billion and let’s hold everybody harmless. Well, now, that’s good politics. I’m not negating the politics of it, but is that good policy? As my good friend Mr. Pallone from New Jersey said, not one dime is going to be added to the deficit. Well, he didn’t tell you where the money is coming from.

“Here’s where the money is coming from, and I have read the bill. Luckily it’s only two pages so it’s not that hard to read. It is coming from something called the Medicare Improvement Fund – $566 million is coming from the Medicare Improvement Fund. That’s a fund that our majority has set up in a bill last year and I think, that there’s about $20 billion in that fund. Yet the rest of it is a transfer that is coming from the Treasury of the Federal Supplementary Medical Insurance Trust Fund and they’re going to take $556 million from this, what I call temporary fund, and the rest of it from the general Federal Supplementary Medical Insurance Trust Fund. So they’re taking money that has been paid in by our Medicare taxes and they’re just saying we’re going to use some of that money. That trust fund is going broke, it’s in the red, it’s getting worse every year, but we’re just going to take some of that money and use it this year.

“My friends on the majority are right to say for this year, for this $2.7 billion, there’s no added borrowing but they’re wrong to say, in my opinion, that it’s not adding to the deficit because they’re taking money out of the general Medicare fund that we’re going to need in future.

“Again, Republicans are not objecting to the fact that for that 25 percent of seniors who are not protected by hold-harmless that we do something to help them. But it’s been done so cavalierly, on such short notice, with absolutely no process at all that democracy cannot work. Mr. Speaker, democracy cannot work if we don’t let the people know why we’re making decisions and what the policy implications are, not just for our senior citizens, but for all of us.

“I’m not going to ask for a no vote because we do need to do something. But I am going to ask that my friends in the majority really think about holding a hearing on this even though it will be after the fact. We need to get the facts on the table and try to set up a process so that we don’t have to next year and the next year and the next year come out here without absolutely no advance warning and with no real understanding of what the long-term implications are.

“With that, Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.”