Medicare and Social Security Statement by the President.

None of the great achievements of our past 50 years is more important to the people of this country than social security and Medicare. They provide earned benefits to millions of retired people and disabled Americans, and they protect all of us from living in fear of a future of poverty, dependence, and despair. These great initiatives are the pride of the Democratic Party. Their history illustrates the basic differences between Democrats and Republicans in American public life.

We Democrats believe in a strong social security system. We fought for it and we enacted it over Republican opposition. We Democrats believe in affordable health care for all Americans. Under Harry Truman and Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, we fought for Medicare over Republican opposition. And we are fighting Republican opposition today to enact an affordable national health plan that will improve Medicare for the elderly, extend protection against catastrophic medical expenses to all of us, improve health coverage for the poor, and provide special benefits to expectant mothers and children in the first years of life. That is the Democratic agenda and the agenda for the next 4 years of the Carter administration.

Where do the Republicans stand in this election? Governor Reagan's first major experience in public life was to engage in an active, hard-fought campaign against Medicare. If he had his way, our seniors would have little protection against health costs today. Last Tuesday night in the debate, he tried to tell us he just supported an alternate approach, but the record speaks for itself. That so-called alternate approach, the Kerr bill, was simply a welfare bill which would have helped only those who had already spent their life savings, sold off their assets, and sacrificed their economic security to pay their medical bills.

The truth is that Governor Reagan worked to convince the American people that Medicare, which protects all of us against medical expenses when we retire or are disabled, was socialism. He made that charge in a phonograph record which was the main organizing tool of the American Medical Association's anti-Medicare campaign. He also charged that Medicare would lead to the Government's telling people where to live and where to work and that if Medicare passed, "you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free."

The truth is, it took Democratic Presidents and Democratic Congresses to pass Medicare over the opposition of Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party, just as it will take a Democratic President and a Democratic Congress to enact a national health plan over that same opposition.

Nor is Governor Reagan's opposition to Medicare and Medicaid a matter of ancient history. He wrote in his syndicated newspaper column for April 5, 1979, that "those who claimed during the debates over Medicare-Medicaid in the 1960's that these programs would be the first foot in the door to massive Government interference in health care have been proved totally correct."

Tuesday night we saw the same Ronald Reagan who posed as a friend of Medicare assume the role of lifelong defender of the social security system. He actually told us he had never advocated making the social security system voluntary. Everyone knows that if we let wealthy people who can afford elaborate private pensions leave the social security system, the cost to those Americans who would be left would rise to prohibitive levels. But before Ronald Reagan began to aspire to higher office, that is exactly what he proposed. Because of his denial, it is important to set the record straight.

For example, in October of 1964 in a local speech, he said this: "Can't we introduce voluntary features that would benefit a citizen to do better on his own, to be excused upon presentation of evidence that he had made provisions in nonearning years?" And this was not a single flight of fancy; it was a consistent Reagan theme for several years.

Governor Reagan has a right to change his mind. He does not have a right to rewrite history on subjects as important as social security and Medicare. Last Tuesday night he showed not just a desire to revise the past but also a fundamental failure to understand the value of the social security system as it exists today.

Mr. Reagan told the Nation: "The problem for young people today is that they are paying into social security far more than they can ever expect to get out." If those of us who listened to Governor Reagan believed him, then it could do great damage to public confidence in the social security system. But Governor Reagan was flat wrong. The average young worker with dependents will receive benefits 3 1/2 times the amount of his payments and 13/4 the amount paid by himself and his employer together.

Contrary to Governor Reagan's misinformed opinion, social security is and will remain a sound investment. It protects almost all of us from disability and provides a hedge against dependency as we grow older. I want to see that it stays that way. I think it is important when the same Governor Reagan who did favor a voluntary social security system years ago, just as he did fight against the enactment of Medicare, believes, mistakenly, that social security is a poor investment for the young people of our country.

The positions of Mr. Reagan's past are important not because we seek to debate history but because their echoes are heard in the positions he and his advisers are taking today.

I listened carefully to Mr. Reagan's comments Tuesday night, and this is what he said about the future of social security. "What is needed," he said, "is a study I have proposed by a task force of experts to look into this entire problem as to how it can be reformed and made actuarially sound, but with the premise that no one presently dependent on social security is going to have the rug pulled out from under them and not get their check."

What will emerge from this study directed by "experts" who will see that no one "presently" in social security loses benefits? Does Governor Reagan propose to reduce benefits for those Americans now paying into the social security system not yet dependent on its benefits? Does he intend to reduce the cost-of-living allowance for retirees, as his advisers suggested last Friday in the Wall Street Journal? Does he intend to let affluent Americans who can afford large private pensions "opt out" of the system, leaving far higher tax burdens on those who remain? What does he have in mind? I find little to comfort the American people in the record of Mr. Reagan, the record of the Republican Party, or the reports from behind the closed doors of his advisers.

Mr. Reagan has a habit of saying that we are distorting his position. But it was Governor Reagan who built a record of opposition to Medicare and a national health plan; it was Governor Reagan who once proposed a voluntary social security system; and it was Governor Reagan who carefully hedged his answers last Tuesday and told us then that social security is a poor investment for young Americans.

My own position is clear. I oppose taxation of social security benefits. I support the indexing of benefits to keep pace with inflation. I oppose cutting back basic social security and disability provisions on which most Americans rely. As I have in the past, I will insist on the financial integrity of the system. The social security reforms enacted 2 years ago have fundamentally assured the integrity of the system through the first quarter of the 21st century. If adjustments are needed, we will see that they are fair. And I will seek to assure, as with the 8-percent social security tax credit I proposed in the economic renewal program, that social security taxes are relieved in ways which are consistent with the health and integrity of the system as a whole.

Social security and Medicare have immeasurably improved the lives of senior citizens in this country. Governor Reagan can remember, as I can, when older Americans lived in constant fear of financial disaster, when men and women who had worked hard all their lives had to face a retirement without dignity. I am proud to stand for social security and for decent health care, and I propose to continue the great fight for social justice in our country.

Let's win this election and get on with our work of building a secure future for our Nation.