Senate Budget Committee Hearing Focuses on Future of Entitlement Program Spending

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), U.S. Comptroller General David Walker and other witnesses on Wednesday testified before the Senate Budget Committee on legislation that would establish a commission to address issues related to the long-term financial stability of entitlement programs including Medicare, CQ Today reports (CQ Today, 10/31).

The legislation, proposed by Committee Chair Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) and ranking member Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), would establish a bipartisan, 16-member task force comprised of lawmakers and Bush administration officials that would make recommendations to address the issue by Dec. 9, 2008. The task force would include 14 lawmakers; the secretary of the U.S. Department of Treasury, who would chair the committee; and a second administration official selected by the president (Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, 9/19).

Eight of the lawmakers on the task force would be Democrats and the remaining six would be Republicans, according to CQ Today. While he supported establishing the task force in 2008 as scheduled, Hoyer told committee members that "the process of developing a plan and legislative recommendations should not begin until our new president is inaugurated in January 2009." He also recommended that Congress should be allowed to debate alternatives to the task force's proposals. Hoyer said he opposed the inclusion of officials from the Bush administration, which he said has "refused to put all options on the table." Hoyer also noted that White House officials would be out of office when the proposal comes to a vote in 2009, and therefore they would have "no stake" in the proposal's success. Walker and Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, recommended that the task force have bipartisan co-chairs.

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Hoyer said, "I would like to believe that Congress could address these issues through the regular legislative process. However, the experience of recent years suggests that this is extremely difficult in the current political environment."

Conrad and Gregg expressed concerns about proposed revisions to their bill, noting that any changes could disrupt the process. Walker said, "We have been diagnosed with fiscal cancer" (CQ Today, 10/31).

Bixby said, "Nobody can say when all of this might end up in a crisis," but he noted that increasing financial challenges could result in "a long, slow erosion in the standard of living."

Leon Panetta, co-chair of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and a former Clinton administration official, said the proposed commission "ought to be the framework that a new Congress and new president put in place."

AARP CEO Bill Novelli, said, "Health-care costs are the key fiscal problem for the budget." Novelli urged lawmakers to look beyond simplistic solutions such as reducing benefits or tweaking revenues to find an effective method to contain rising health care costs (McClatchy/Arizona Daily Star, 11/1).