Gingrich Backs Denial of Medicare to Wealthy : Entitlements: He also says Congress must eventually ‘look at’ ways to keep Social Security from going broke.

Acknowledging the need to curb the growth of entitlement programs, incoming House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said Thursday that wealthy retirees should buy their own health insurance and that Congress eventually must “look at” long-term and perhaps painful ways to keep Social Security solvent.

Denying Medicare to retirees with annual incomes of more than $100,000 would save the government about $6 billion in five years, Gingrich said.

During a breakfast interview with reporters, he also expressed regret over having suggested that as many as one in four White House staffers had used drugs before joining the Clinton Administration and over having called President and Mrs. Clinton one-time members of the “counterculture.”

The outspoken Georgia Republican said he stands by his remarks, but added that he should have kept them to himself. “If I had to say it over again, I probably wouldn’t say it,” Gingrich said.

“I don’t delight in controversy. I like achievement,” he added, saying that his remarks were routine bumps that one faces during any job change. “I’m trying to learn a new job,” Gingrich said.

Had he not made those remarks, Gingrich acknowledged, “the country might well have been better off for it.”

His comments about Social Security and Medicare, the tax-financed health insurance program for the elderly and the disabled, are significant because Republican leaders in recent years have flatly declared Social Security untouchable and past efforts to restrain Medicare spending have proved politically lethal.

Gingrich’s remarks come as a bipartisan Commission on Entitlement Reform and Tax Reform is completing a report for Clinton next week--thus ensuring the issue even greater visibility in the days ahead.

Budget experts say Congress will never eliminate the federal deficit unless it curbs spending on the big entitlement programs that provide guaranteed government benefits to millions of Americans.

Gingrich prefaced his suggestion that Congress cannot avoid taking up the Social Security funding issue by saying that the retirement program must remain undisturbed for the foreseeable future, calling the solvency question “a problem . . . somewhere around 25 to 30 years from now.”

On the other hand, he added, “the problem of children dying in dumpsters is this evening. The problem of schools that fail to educate is this afternoon. The problem of rethinking the cost of Medicaid is this morning.”

Before tackling Social Security, Gingrich argued, Washington must “earn the trust of the American people” by solving more pressing social and economic problems.

And even then, he said, the public must be fully engaged during a search for remedies. Among those already mentioned by the entitlement commission staff are raising taxes and elevating the age for Social Security eligibility to 70.

“I’ve talked a lot about the need to have dialogue on the budget where the American people get to learn all the data, in general terms, and the American people get to participate in the decisions,” Gingrich said.

“I think there are a lot of things that you have to look at over the long run,” he said. “But I would also assert that in the short run . . . you have to take Social Security off the table and deal with everything else. And when you finish dealing with everything else, and you’ve done it right, you will have earned the trust of the American people to look at Social Security.”

Although Social Security is in surplus now, projections are that it will run out of cash in the year 2029. Similarly, Medicare’s hospital trust fund will go broke in 2001 under current spending rates. Gingrich did not say how soon Congress should act on the Medicare shortfall.

The reform commission, chaired by Sens. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.) and John C. Danforth (R-Mo.), is to deliver a report to Clinton by Thursday on controlling entitlement programs, which account for 47% of the budget but threaten to consume nearly all federal spending by the next century.

On other issues Thursday, Gingrich sounded both conciliatory and combative, particularly in discussing the prospects of working with a Democratic President and a Senate that, while dominated by Republicans, has rules that would enable Democrats to derail GOP initiatives--much as the Republicans did this year while in the minority.

He cited the GOP intention to grant Clinton the line-item veto as “a sign of reaching beyond normal partisanship.”

“There’s no (public) tolerance for confrontation which is purely partisan or purely personality,” he added. “I don’t think we should ever pick a fight with the President of the United States if it’s avoidable. And I don’t think we should ever shrink from a fight if it’s necessary.”

As for the Senate, Gingrich said that he does not believe Democrats will resort to parliamentary tactics to stymie the GOP agenda. That, he said, would be “fairly irrational” behavior given the drubbing the Democrats took at the polls last month.

“The American people are tired of gridlock . . . tired of a decentralized, diffused system that can’t make any decision and where every small baron has enough influence that they can say no but nobody has enough influence to say yes,” Gingrich said.

“I think what they don’t want is a bunch of very well-meaning and sincere people who can’t even call a huddle.”

‘Contract With America’

* The full text of the Republican “contract with America” is available on the TimesLink on-line service. Also available are biographies of Newt Gingrich and up-and-coming GOP leaders. Sign on and click “Special Reports” in the Nation & World section.

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