Clinton to Push for Reform of Medicare, Social Security

WASHINGTON — With a bipartisan agreement to balance the budget locked into place, President Clinton said Friday that he will now push for broad changes in Medicare and other federal benefit programs to prevent them from exploding in cost in the next century.

Clinton said he plans to launch a bipartisan effort to tackle the stubborn, politically sensitive issue of benefit programs soon, with a goal of proposing new legislation next year.

“When this [budget agreement] is done, I want to find some sort of bipartisan process to address the long-term entitlement issue,” Clinton told a small group of reporters in the Oval Office.

Later, he added: “It could be done before the ’98 election.”

His comments represent his most explicit commitment yet to seek major changes in entitlements as a follow-up to this month’s budget agreement.

Critics have attacked the balanced-budget accord--which received final Senate approval Friday--for failing to control long-term costs of entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security.

But in Friday’s session with reporters, Clinton argued that it will be easier to sell changes in the popular programs if they are separated from the inflammatory questions of cutting taxes or balancing the budget. With the Senate action, both houses of Congress have now approved the broad outlines of the spending agreement.

“Consider this: If there is a bipartisan process that leads to entitlement reform, no Democrat or Republican will be subject to criticism . . . that they voted for anything on entitlements just to balance the budget or just to pay for a tax cut, because it will all be set aside,” Clinton insisted.

Still, Clinton’s commitment to move forward on reforming politically sensitive benefit programs promises to produce more tension inside a Democratic Party already divided over his budget agreement with the GOP. While many centrist Democrats expressed eagerness to pursue entitlement reform during the budget talks, such changes are anathema to liberal leaders who believe that defending traditional social programs offers them their best chance of regaining control of Congress.

Stanley B. Greenberg, Clinton’s 1992 campaign pollster, argues that voters are likely to recoil from further reductions in Medicare and Social Security: “The popular agenda does not encompass the kind of entitlement reform contemplated by elite opinion,” he wrote in a recent paper.

But the pressure to reform entitlement programs is growing with the upcoming retirement of the huge baby-boom generation, which will add millions of new beneficiaries to the rolls. Although Social Security faces no imminent crisis, rising costs for Medicare and Medicaid will put increasing strain on the federal budget soon after it is scheduled to reach balance in 2002.

Today, mandatory spending programs account for about half of the federal budget. By 2020, when the baby boomers begin entering retirement homes, that figure will rise to 67%, the Office of Management and Budget recently calculated.

In explaining why he wanted to hold off entitlement reform until after a budget deal, Clinton said he concluded that the political process is only able to absorb a limited number of initiatives at one time. “One of the things I’ve learned around here is that this system can only accommodate so much change at once,” he said.

In a similar vein, Clinton decided this week to postpone a push to expand free-trade agreements through what is known as the “fast-track” process until the White House has had more time to build public support. Privately, he has expressed concerns that legislators might pressure him for concessions on the budget as the price for fast-track support, or vice versa.

“It’s just like we had to announce that we weren’t going to actually bring fast track to the Congress until September--the system wouldn’t know how to accommodate it, we cannot do it,” Clinton said.

By tackling the budget before moving on to the giant entitlement programs, he said, “all the members of both parties will be free of the stigma of having done it [entitlement reform] as a part of something to balance the budget or a part of something to cut taxes. So if anybody wants to vote for it, they can say ‘You may not agree with what I did, but I did it for the long-term benefit of the people of the United States.’ ”

In addition, the president suggested that balancing the budget may allow him to move forward with new government initiatives that would have been impossible as long as opponents could cite the deficit as a reason to block any new spending. Clinton said he has argued to some Democrats that, by dealing with the budget deficit, they can move on to face “not only the entitlement problem . . . [but] the problems that children have in this country.”

Times political writer Ronald Brownstein contributed to this story.

* SENATE OKs BUDGET PACT

The Senate approved the outlines of a balanced budget. A18