Ranking Member of the Senate Finance Committee Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said that the Congressional Budget Office’s recently released long-term budget outlook should be a call to action for meaningful structural entitlement reforms as part of the debt ceiling negotiations.
Hatch introduced five bipartisan reform ideas earlier this year that were presented to President Obama, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.
“Earlier this year, I unveiled five bipartisan entitlement reform ideas that should be a part of any fiscal discussions this fall,” Hatch said. “The time to get serious is now. America – our seniors, our children and grandchildren – can’t afford a White House that chooses to whistle past the graveyard of our country’s fiscal health and the tremendous weight that our debt is around the neck of a robust, long-term economic revival.”
The CBO reported that economic growth and private sector investment is threatened by America’s debt, citing federal entitlement programs as the chief source of the debt. The entitlement programs, the CBO says, will reach more than 14 percent of the nation’s GDP by 2038.
Among Hatch’s entitlement reforms are raising the Medicare eligibility age to 67, modernizing the Medigap program, simplifying Medicare beneficiary cost sharing and establishing a catastrophic limit, allowing Medicare competitive bidding and strengthening the Medicaid program through per capita caps.