HEALTH CARE : GOP Town Hall Meetings Try to Get Fix on Medicare : Party strategy has Florida legislator use scripted talking points to solicit opinions. He hears plenty from concerned senior citizens.

With a script of talking points provided by Republican leaders under his arm, freshman Rep. Mark Foley came home to Central Florida to solicit voters’ opinions on Medicare. On two successive days, in a congressional district with one of the highest concentrations of senior citizens in the nation, he got an earful.

Thunder rattled the roofs during the back-to-back town hall meetings Foley hosted last week, but even the commotion of an August rainstorm could not drown out his constituents’ concerns.

“I had open-heart surgery four years ago and got a bill for $90,000,” retiree Jim Sullivan, 73, told Foley and a group of about 100 others who pulled up folding chairs in a middle school cafeteria. “When I asked about the charges, I was told, ‘Don’t worry; we stick Medicare for what we can get.’

“But I’m Medicare. That’s what upsets me. This thing is out of whack.”

As Congress prepares to reconvene for the fall session, nothing looms larger on the legislative agenda than the debate over Medicare. Although Republicans and Democrats agree that the health care plan for the elderly is in a financial crisis and its hospital trust fund headed for bankruptcy by the year 2002, party leaders have been unable to agree on how to fix it.

The GOP, behind House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia, has attempted to take the initiative on reform, promising to reduce the growth in future spending by $270 billion while preserving benefits to Medicare’s 37 million recipients. But beyond vows not to cut benefits and to preserve seniors’ choice in coverage and doctors, Republicans have offered few details on how they intend to save the program.

That has led President Clinton to suggest that Republican leaders already have drawn up a plan for Medicare cuts that will be kept secret until time for a vote this fall. Furthermore, they claim, the savings will be used to give a tax cut to the wealthy. The Clinton Administration has proposed a more modest package of Medicare savings, a proposal to reduce spending by $125 billion over 10 years through reductions in payments to hospitals and doctors.

The 40-year-old Foley, a deputy House whip whose district includes parts of West Palm Beach as well as vast agricultural areas around Lake Okeechobee, denies the President’s charges.

“There is no secret plan,” Foley told a community center audience in West Palm Beach the day before the meeting here. “There is nothing under the desk, waiting for us to return to Congress in the fall and flash it out on you.”

But there was a Republican strategy at work here and elsewhere across the country during the August recess.

In scores of town hall meetings like this one, Republicans set out to hear constituents’ concerns and to offer reassurances about GOP plans for reform. As aides used an overhead projector to flash Medicare charts and graphs on a big screen, Foley tried to reassure his audiences that “if you like the Medicare plan you have now, you can stay with it.”

For Foley, a onetime Democrat and former restaurateur, real estate broker and state legislator who rode the GOP landslide last fall into Florida’s open 16th Congressional District seat, the assignment from party leaders to conduct town hall meetings was a chance to cash in on a recent run of favorable national publicity. While a firm admirer of Gingrich, Foley has also gained renown as one of the so-called New Federalists, a group of about 20 to 25 GOP freshmen who have been willing to oppose the Republican leadership on some issues.

Several times during the two town hall sessions, constituents rose to laud Foley as “a rising star” in national GOP circles.

Most of those who turned out for the meetings were gray-haired, opinionated and already receiving benefits from the health care plan started 30 years ago under the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson. They like Medicare, and rely on it. They are worried about its future.

“I’m shaking in my boots about what’s going to happen with Medicare,” said Jim Goetz, 64, a retired federal employee. “I think Congress is the problem; you guys write the rules.”

In more than three hours of free-for-all discussion, Foley heard tales of gallbladder operations, expensive diagnostic tests, and complaints that illegal immigrants and prisoners get better health care than do law-abiding taxpayers. Responding to Foley’s reference to a General Accounting Office study that found $44 billion worth of waste and fraud in Medicare, many in the audience offered up their own suspicions of price gouging.

“I have been paying $316 for two hours [of] physical therapy,” said Fred S. Carter, 73, a retired physician who recently lost a leg to blood clots. “When I asked about it, they said, ‘What do you care? You’re not paying for it anyway.’ ”

Waste and fraud were not subjects Foley wanted to dwell on, however. Neither, he said, did he want to invite attacks on the Democrats.

Rather, following explicit guidelines prepared for GOP representatives by a research company hired by the Republican National Committee, Foley seemed content to let people air their grievances, their personal histories and their ideas for change.

“We’re not paying in enough, and we have to raise the age of beneficiaries because people are living longer,” said C. Colburn Hardy, 86, a retired public relations man and author of several books on financial planning. “We either pay more or reduce services. It’s a compromise.”

Asked Catherine Ross, 73, a nurse from Hobe Sound: “Why does health care cost so much? Because we have allowed it. This is our country. We have to take charge.”

Given the protests that greeted Gingrich in Atlanta at an Aug. 7 conference on Medicare, Foley said, “Frankly, I was expecting a lot of acrimony. . . . I thought there might be picketers outside.”

In fact, Foley saw only one picket--Tom Tomlinson, a 51-year-old park ranger for the state of Florida who showed up to protest what he called Foley’s anti-environmental positions.

Foley ignored Tomlinson, while sticking to the message: “For those like myself who someday hope to join the ranks of Medicare recipients, this crisis must be solved. And we have to deal with it in a bipartisan way.”

Once back in Washington, Foley says he will report to Rep. Michael Bilirakis (R-Fla.), chairman of a House subcommittee on health, and Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) on what his constituents had to say. He also reiterated Gingrich’s pledge that no final plan will be drawn up until each Republican House member has reported in.

“What we learned is that the Medicare issue comes down to base fears; it’s a financial and health issue, and it gets down to self-preservation,” Foley said.

“We have to be careful how we deal with the issue. As long as we do bring back the information from constituents, OK. But if this has turned out to be some dog-and-pony show that has no substance, then people feel used, and our credibility is challenged.”