GOP PLAN TAKES SENSIBLE APPROACH TO SAVE MEDICARE

Quick: in the same week that noted anti-Semite and practiced hater Louis Farrakhan led his march on Washington, what group was being labeled as "extremists" by Clinton administration figures such as Vice President Albert Gore? If you guessed the Republican majority in Congress, go to the head of the class. Of course, this is the same administration that, having remained silent on Farrakhan and his abundant venom, lectures us about how we need more civility in our public discourse.

No subject exercises these folks more than Medicare, or rather the congressional majority's efforts to reform that plan to avert bankruptcy. That a Medicare bankruptcy is looming isn't in dispute and hasn't been since Medicare trustees issued a report certifying that the program will begin showing deficits in the hundreds of billions by the year 2002 -- a scant seven years off. A few more years down the road, when the first baby boomers begin retiring, Medicare's deficits will explode to the utterly unsustainable level of $1.5 trillion annually. These are the stark facts confronted today by those who must actually make the tough choices necessary to govern, as opposed to minority Democrats who can afford to posture and demagogue, incite staged demonstrations and stalk out of committee hearings in a childish huff.

There has been a lot of intentional distortion and errant nonsense about alleged Medicare cuts. It is therefore worth noting -- again -- that under the GOP reform plan, Medicare spending will continue to rise at the rate of 6.8 percent a year over the next seven years. Today, Medicare spends approximately $4,800 a year for each recipient. The GOP plan would take that figure to $6,700 over the seven years. Only in Washington can a reduction in the previously planned (and wholly unsustainable) rate of annual increase of 10.5 percent to the still-healthy increase of 6.8 percent be called a cut.

Lost amid all the hysterical rhetoric is the fact that Medicare has been rapidly evolving into a government-run scheme for rationing health care and controlling prices. Inevitable dislocations occur with long delays and cramped choices for recipients and inadequate reimbursement for providers, both physicians and hospitals.

The GOP plan holds out the promise of an exciting breakout from this encounter of mutual frustration into what the futurists call a new paradigm: market choices in health care. This can't be done without expanding the choices of individuals to make their own health care choices, and the GOP plan does this. For the first time, seniors will have the option of either remaining in the current system or going to MediSave accounts -- sort of an IRA for health care. This will empower individuals to become more responsible health-care consumers and, in the process, maintain control of costs, for which there isn't any incentive under the current, third-party payer system. It is also the beginning of privatizing of the government-run rationing scheme that Medicare is becoming.

Make no mistake about the difficulty of what congressional Republicans are attempting to do. It isn't easy or especially fun to do the heavy lifting and make the difficult choices of where and how to prune decades of we-can-have-it-all Great Society social spending. Sober citizens who have studied the matter know that this difficult job can't be postponed without exacerbating the inevitable day of reckoning. More power to the Republicans. If President Clinton follows through on his veto threat and the resultant confrontation develops, and the Richard Gephardts and David Boniors are still shrieking their loudest, the American people will know who is serious about needed reforms, and who isn't.