from Tuscaloosa News:
TUSCALOOSA | “Social Security could face a deficit within two years,” U.S. Rep. Spencer Bachus predicted here Tuesday. “The situation is much worse than people realize, especially because of the problems brought on by the recession, near depression.
“That’s not been on the board — people don’t seem to know that,” Bachus, the ranking member of the House Committee on Financial Services, said in a wide-ranging interview with the Tuscaloosa News Editorial Board. “What this recession has done to Social Security is pretty alarming.
“We’ve known for 15 years that we were going to have to make adjustment to Social Security, but we still through that was seven or eight years down the road,” he said. “But if things don’t improve very quickly, we’re going to be dealing with that problem before we know it.”
The solvency of Social Security, which provides pensions for people over 65, has not played a major role in the current debate over health care in Congress and Bachus, a Vestavia Hills Republican who represents part of Tuscaloosa County, said it will not likely be addressed in any health care bill the House eventually passes, although if a Social Security bail out is needed, it will invariably impact government health care programs.
In the debate over health care, Bachus said that he could support a bill that includes privately-administered health “co-ops,” along with the elimination of fraud and waste in existing government programs like Medicaid and Medicare.
The creation of health care “co-ops,” or non-profit health cooperatives run by members, is an idea that has gained momentum as Democrats and President Barack Obama seems to have moved away from the idea of a “government option,” which would be a government-run alternative to private health care now offered by for-profit insurance companies.
“I can not vote for a bill that has the government intruding into the private sector, subsidizing health care and eventually putting the insurance companies out of business,” he said.
As for the looming Social Security crisis, Bachus said options are just now beginning to be discussed.
“We could raise the retirement age, or in the worst case, cut back on some benefits,” he said. “But that is something we are just now beginning to get a handle on.”
Bachus visited The News the morning after a standing-room-only crowd of 2,000 people attended a health care public forum he hosted in Birmingham Monday night.
Unlike some town hall meetings that have turned chaotic across the county as members of Congress have returned to their districts during the August congressional recess, Bachus said there was “only a little friction” between opponents of various health care proposals advanced by the Democratic majority in Congress and those who support those proposals.
“I think everyone was for the most part civil and we had a lot of people just agree to disagree,” he said. “But you can tell that health care is an issue that has energized the country, because I have never had a town meeting with 2,000 people. And we even had to turn away a lot of people because of fire department regulations.”
