CLINTON'S PRESCRIPTION FOR SENIOR CITIZENS CUTS THE BASICS

The secret's out, no thanks to President Clinton. His longer term fiscal program -- and he hopes to serve six more years in the White House -- aims straight at us senior citizens and our economic and medical interests.

It was his budget director, Alice Rivlin, who spilled the beans. It was her memo that contained the news, and it was somebody on the White House staff who leaked the memo to the news media. The news was that the Clinton administration hopes to find much of the money it needs by taking it away from us, by cutting Medicare and Social Security.

The fact that this news reached the news media just as Bill Clinton was boasting how much he had reduced the deficit was just a bit of bad luck for him. But the pressures under which he is working were evident earlier, as was the fact that the deficit will swell enormously if he doesn't do something drastic.

All of us are old enough to have noticed long ago that politicians are liberal with their promises but don't want to be tarred with the blame when it comes to finding the money to pay for their promises. The money in the last analysis must come from us and our children, the taxpayers.

As Clinton sees it, his immediate problem is the fault of modern medicine. It works too well. Senior citizens' numbers are multiplying rapidly. Or put another way, we aren't dying as young as we used to. So every day and every month there are more of us to claim our Medicare and Social Security rights as recipients, benefits for which we've been paying taxes for decades.

Budget Director Rivlin, in her now-famous memo, was telling Bill and Hillary that one way of handling the problem was to cut the benefits. "Rich senior citizens," that is, people with incomes less than Rivlin's salary, could be made to pay more for their doctor and hospital bills. Or, alternatively, Medicare fees for doctors and hospitals could be cut.

Unfortunately for the Clinton brain trust, Medicare's present fees for doctors are already only 6 percent of the amounts they charge citizens under 65. Doctors, naturally, won't be pleased if their fees are cuts down to 40 percent or 30 percent of what they charge others. In fact, if this happens, many more of them will stop seeing Medicare patients.

This practice of cutting physicians' fees mercilessly has long been the rule under Medicaid, the program for the poor. So all over the country it's hard to find an internist or surgeon or any other physician who has great enthusiasm for seeing Medicaid patients. As the doctors point out, Medicaid payments don't even cover their overhead office expenses they have to pay.

Do we really want to be as unpopular with our physicians as Medicaid patients are? I don't think so.

The Clintons, of course, look at the problem differently. How, they ask in effect, are they going to pay the ever-rising bills for Medicare unless they apply such drastic medicine?

Well, I have a suggestion: There are a lot of wasteful and unnecessary things that are done by the federal bureaucracy at the cost of billions of dollars. What does the Department of Agriculture do that really needs to be done? Sure, it pays rich subsidies to rich farmers, but is it really sensible to do that? Why no just abolish the Agriculture Department and perhaps other departments too?

Back in the famous budget battle last year where Clinton fought for his supposed austerity budget, it was only a few perceptive observers who say that he abolished virtually nothing that the federal government was doing. What he did mostly was to cut spending increases envisioned for budget years 1995, 1996 and 1997.

But now we're in the 1995 budget year, and 1996 and 1997 are not as far away as they once seemed to be. All those Washington bureaucrats are expecting their usual salary increases, and besides they've hired more people. So it's becoming more apparent that the great budget cuts of 1993 are likely to be illusions.

Moreover, just last month Clinton thought we were rich enough to agree to spend vast sums to pay for the oil North Korea imports in the years immediately ahead. North Korea is our enemy. Why make sure they're warm and deny senior citizens here their deserved benefits? It's crazy.

Harry Schwartz, now 75 years old, was a member of the New York Times editorial board for almost 30 years.