Democrats, GOP Trade Brickbats on Medicare Reform : Politics: War of words heats up as both sides try to provoke the other into action. Each party is demanding the other offer a detailed rescue plan.

With Medicare suddenly becoming the hottest political issue in town, Republicans and Democrats on Tuesday battered each other in vitriolic terms, each side demanding that the other offer a detailed plan to rescue the imperiled health care fund.

Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) and House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), after accusing President Clinton of “searching for votes” instead of solutions, invited him to meet them at the Capitol to devise a rescue plan for Medicare.

Firing back for the Administration was Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, who told a House Ways and Means Committee hearing: “The President has called for meaningful health care reform . . . but the reply from the Republicans so far has been silence.”

She challenged the Republicans to offer a detailed plan for the entire federal budget before the Administration will agree to discuss Medicare’s fiscal problems.

The war of words over Medicare is expected to escalate today when the President addresses 2,260 delegates assembled for the formal opening of the White House Conference on Aging. He is expected to portray himself as a staunch defender of Medicare against the challenge of Republican budget-cutters.

The Dole-Gingrich news conference was a preemptive political strike against Clinton. The White House, after suffering a drubbing from Republicans last year over its ill-fated health care reform plan, now apparently hopes to turn the tables and make the Republicans the villains on Medicare.

The Medicare trust fund, which helps pay for hospital bills, will go broke in the year 2002, according to a trustees report issued earlier this month. The situation is improved from a year ago, when 2001 was forecast as the date of insolvency.

But both sides now seem to see the trustees report as an opportunity to embarrass the other party.

Eventually, Medicare spending must be slowed, experts agree, because the program is growing at a rate of nearly 10% a year.

Republicans have said that curbing the rate of growth of the program to 7% would save about $250 billion over seven years--and would represent the biggest changes in Medicare’s history. But Democrats contend that such savings would mean fewer services to the growing elderly population.

Shalala said that the added financial burdens to Medicare’s beneficiaries, if they have to pay more for their health care, would wipe out half the value of the annual cost-of-living hike they receive in their Social Security payments.

Republicans believe that much of the money can be saved through the voluntary movement of millions of people into health maintenance organizations and other managed-care systems.

But they also have pledged to allow people to remain in the current Medicare plan, under which citizens can pick any doctor, go to any specialist or use any hospital.

The adamant refusal of both the Democratic Administration and the Republican Congress to offer a Medicare solvency plan made Tuesday’s House hearings an exercise in feigned indignation and angry partisanship.

“This hearing is rapidly becoming a total waste of time,” said Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr. (R-Fla.). “What in the world do you people do down there?” he asked Shalala. “You’ve got to step forward and give the country some leadership.”

Ways and Means Chairman Rep. Bill Archer (R-Tex.) lectured Shalala: “Don’t hold America’s seniors hostage to the Administration’s failed, big government health care reforms.”

But she insisted that Medicare could not be separated from general health care reform and insisted that the President would talk only after the Republicans disclosed how they would balance the budget to pay for a “tax cut for the well-off.”

Some of the toughest remarks came from Rep. Pete Stark (D-Oakland), who said: “Republicans holding a hearing to save Medicare reminds me of the man who murdered his parents and begged for mercy as an orphan.”

Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) said that the Republicans were befuddled by the challenge of balancing the budget without making deep inroads into Medicare. “They are now frozen like deer in the headlights of cars--they can’t move,” said Rangel.

Gingrich has said that the Republicans will separate Medicare when they balance the budget, using Medicare savings exclusively to rescue the Medicare trust fund.

Neither side wants to be seen as responsible for tampering with a vastly popular program that provides health benefits to 32 million Americans over 65 and 4 million disabled persons.

Medicare, which spent $165 billion last year, is the fourth largest item in the federal budget, ranking behind Social Security, defense and interest payments on the national debt.

Senate Democratic leaders said Tuesday that the Republican maneuvering over Medicare was a diversionary tactic to distract attention from GOP disarray over how to make good on their promise to balance the budget by 2002.

“We’ve had 100 days of easy promises,” said Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.). “Now they face the hard work of being in the majority.”

Sen. J. James Exon of Nebraska, ranking Democrat on the Budget Committee who earlier this year supported a constitutional amendment to balance the budget, said that GOP budget jockeying had caused him to rethink his position on the amendment. It lost in the Senate by just one vote.

“Unless Republicans are more forthcoming, more honest and more realistic . . . “ about the budget, Exon said, “they might well find themselves more than one vote short.”

Times staff writer Janet Hook contributed to this story.