That frank and accurate answer quickly raised questions about Lieberman's political viability.
Sadly, politics nearly always trumps policy. Take the predictable crisis now rolling through Medicare.
California's health care system is "on the verge of collapse," Sen. Dianne Feinstein warned last month. Nearly 40 California hospitals have closed since 1996. Physician groups "are going bankrupt at the rate of one every two weeks". And three big California HMOs, Cigna, Aetna, and Foundation Health Systems, will stop covering Medicare patients.
Why? Because when Washington faced a Medicare cost crisis in 1997, the last place anyone wanted to cut was benefits. Above all, beneficiaries must always appear to be held harmless. Anyone who presses changes that could be construed otherwise invites accusations that they want to hurt seniors.
As if politicians wake up every day thinking of ways they can harm their most powerful constituency. The problem is exactly the reverse, which is why Medicare still runs on an antiquated 1965 model. It offers no drug benefit and no coverage for many new technologies or basic preventive care. It chokes on red tape, leaves huge coverage gaps requiring seniors to buy extra "Medigap" insurance, and it is going broke. (WebEditor's note: The Medicare Trust Fund is currently being raided by the Clinton Treasury Department to buy out wealthy owners of government bonds: please see the details.)
Medicare's latest problem started three years ago, when Congress and the Administration "fixed" the program with the widely hailed 1997 Balanced Budget Act.
After a huge brawl between Congressional Republicans and President Clinton - which included accusations that the GOP tried to "savage" Medicare - any fundamental overhaul was off the table. But given Medicare's fiscal mess (WebEd: again see above) both sides had to go where the money was to balance the budget.
The obvious place was providers - hospitals, doctors, HMOs, nursing homes, and home health care providers.
The result ? Some 2,500 home health care providers are bankrupt. Some 727,000 HMO beneficiaries have been "involuntarily disenrolled". And, Feinstein says, more than 300 California physician groups have closed, and a large Southern California medical group is about to go under and displace more than half a million patients.
So much for "protecting" seniors.
So now, Congress and the Administration are undoing their 1997 "fixes" that helped create today's budget surpluses (WebEd: see details) and postponed Medicare's bankruptcy to around 2015 - when the huge Baby Boom generation starts retiring.
These reversals mean that the program is back on the fast track to fiscal crisis. "So the cat proverbally chases its tail", says Robert Moffit, director of Domestic Policy at the Heritage Foundation. "It's a profound demonstration of the policy incompetence of both the Administration and Congress".
This shell game leaves Medicare's underlying fiscal problems and antiquated medical model untouched, meaning the Baby Boom generation is in for some big surprises.
The Congressional Budget Office says Medicare spending will double in just the next seven years, to $428 billion. By 2015, costs will reach $1.1 trillion. When the Baby Boom is fully retired in 2030, costs will reach a staggering $3.5 trillion, more than a third of this year's Gross National (WebEd: Domestic) Product.
Vice President Al Gore promises to put an "iron-clad lock box" around Medicare (WebEd: Trust Fund) to ensure adequate revenue. Republicans are falling in line with similar promises. But an "iron-clad lock box" for a program in desperate need of an overhaul is likely to prove as helpful as the lifeboats on the Titanic. (WebEd: On April 14-15, 1912, 711 of the 2,224 persons on board the Titanic were saved by its lifeboats).
Politics almost forces such an outcome. Better to play shell games than pretend (?) to protect beneficiaries. And when Medicare starts to implode in 15 years as the Baby Boom retires ? Today's politicians will be retired , too. (WebEd: on their government pensions and benefits.)