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Clinton May Back Higher Medicare Premiums

It's a shift in policy that puts him closer to congressional Republicans

WASHINGTON (AllPolitics, July 9) -- Moving closer to a controversial Senate proposal, President Bill Clinton confirmed today he will consider raising Medicare premiums for more affluent seniors.

The president had earlier opposed the idea, but in Madrid, Spain, he told reporters that "we will have to look at means testing."

The move follows Senate action last month on a bill to balance the federal budget by 2002. Senators, in a bipartisan 70-30 vote, included two controversial provisions, hiking premiums on the top 5 percent of elderly earners and raising the eligibility for Medicare from 65 to 67.

Clinton, who has been criticized for not embracing bold enough changes to federal entitlement spending, today praised the senators' far-sightedness.

"The Senate committee and then the Senate as a whole deserves a lot of credit for looking to the long-term future of the country and trying to deal early with the impact of the aging of the population on one of our most important systems, Medicare. And I think that we have a responsibility to respond to that, and I intend to," Clinton said.

Administration aides say the president still opposes raising the eligibility age, however. And today he noted that most of the Medicare savings in the budget come from other structural reforms. And he warned against making changes that might create "a new class of people without any health insurance at all."

Score one for the budget deal

Clinton's shift put the much-vaunted balanced budget deal on firmer ground. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) called Clinton's shift "a really important move on their part. That would make our job a lot easier."

It's still not clear, however, if the House will go along with the plan, even though some recent polls suggest popular support. When lawmakers hiked premiums on upper-income seniors in 1988 to pay for catastrophic insurance, the public outcry was so intense that legislators quickly shelved the program.