prefunding at all, which medicare is never designed to be. that's what i was saying earlier. prefunding at all is challenging because we do when we take it in as a federal government, we tend to lend ourselves that money, and if we want to really put it away, that's a challenge for us. but i would be happy to share that proposal. >> i'd love to see it. thank you. sorry for taking so long. >> thank you so much. i know senator udall has to leave. would you like to ask a couple of questions, make a comment? go ahead. go ahead, senator mentz. >> i appreciate it. very kind of you. mr. colman, right there, we all know that medicaid was never intended to be the primary provider of long-term care coverage, yet medicaid is the largest pair of long-term care services. with long-term care accounting for almost half of national long-term spending, as a former governor, i know that giving our states the plexability and resources they need to innovate is a first and critical step toward controlling spending in the medicaid program and improving long-term care outcomes. we will never achiev

the second reason is we've never prefunded the costs of these services. and if we had private insurance reserving premiums and prefunding the payment for the cost of that care, we would in fact address some of our national saving issues and have a benefit there of delivering better overall growth and economic performance at a time when we're going to need every national dollar to meet the variety demands on both the public and the private sector for resources to meet the standards of living for both the elderly and the working population. i think the strategies have to be flexibility and prevention on the costs and private sector first on the financing. and i'd be happy to continue the discussion. thank you. >> thank you very much. so we'll go to questions and comments at the moment. there appear to be three areas where there is strong evidence that we can indeed save money while at the same time not damage effect theiveness of long-term care. and you've all referred to these three. number one, by keeping people out of a hospital in the first place. numbe

secondly, and senator collins went on i think very effectively about this, the prefunding of health benefits. the fact is that in the postal reform act of 2006, you might call it an excess of caution, the postal service was required to make payments into the retiree health benefits fund greater than most any other business or government in -- in the country, and we've just spread this out to a four-year payment schedule according to the normal discounted rate that other federal -- normal discount rate that other federal programs pay for their retirees' benefits. senator collins talked at length about the impact of the -- the way in which the c.b.o., the congressional budget office, refuses to score, as we say, count dollar-for-dollar the amount of money saved by early retirement, which doesn't make any sense because that is what will be saved. now, i want to enter into the record at this point and speak to it the estimate of the united states postal service about what our substitute bill, 1789, will save. and it's quite dramatic. all along, our goal has been to get to a point over three or f

that year, the lame duck congress passed the legislation, requiring the postal service to prefund theirement account for the next 75 years in a ten-year window. who the heck runs their businesses like that? nobody. they were trying to kill the unions and the republicans are doing everything they can to ill that voting bloc. i'm joining tonight by bernie sanders of vermont, who worked very hard on this bill. senator, i hope you saved 200,000 jobs. i don't know how much cooperation you got from the house, but i want to go right to the money. what happens to that money in the senate bill? >> we made significant progress on that, ed. what happens is, as you pointed out, right now the postal service paying $5.5 billion every single year, which is really quite crazy. no other entity in america comes anywhere close to having that kind of burden. what we did is two things. we reduced the $5.5 to $3.5, but we also said the postal service can take $3.5 billion -- $3 billion, i'm sorry, out of the fund, the employee retirement fund, to pay for current retiree benefits, which means they will be s

means that the postal service is likely to see a significant cut in its annual $5 billion bill to prefund retiree health care, which, of course, would take further stress off the postal service's annual operating budget. we expect as this debate goes on to have as close as possible of an exact projection of how much that change would save from the postal service itself. now, let me talk about some of the proposals that the postal service and the postmaster have made that have been most controversial. first, saturday deliveries and canceling most saturday deliveries. the postal service has said it can save $3.1 billion a year by canceling saturday deliveries to individual homes and businesses. not something you want to do, but if you're looking to get this institution back into balance and keep it alive, it's one of the things that we're probably going to have to do. the postal rate commission agrees that ending most saturday deliveries will save a lot of money but says their estimate is $1.7 billion a year as opposed to the $3.1 billion that the postal service estimates. either way, we're

i used to be treasurer of my state, governor of my state and we began prefunding for retirees, but nothing, nothing like this. we instituted that requirement in order for president bush to sign on the bill at a time when the postal service was in good shape. that was a very profitable year, if you will, for the postal service before the roof fell in and the economy went to heck in a hand basket. but the postal service was in pretty good shape, very good shape so the taxpayers wouldn't be saddled with those obligations in the event the postal service couldn't meet it in years to come. president bush said we'll sign this bill. we want to make sure the postal service will always be making money as they were in 2006, and 10, 15 years down the line when they're not doing so well, we want to make sure a large part of their health care benefits for retirees are satisfied or paid for. that is not entirely a bad idea. we didn't know we would enter the worst recessions in 2008. we didn't know we would lose 2.5 million jobs in the second half of 2008. we didn't know we would lose 2 million jobs in th

we also deal with the prefunding of the retiree health benefit issue in our bill as well. but my point is that there is greemenagreement that this is nt taxpayer money. there is agreement that this is a true overpayment. and we have g.a.o. suggesting that we do exactly what this bill does, which is a one-time refund of the overpayment tied to reforms to address the usps's financial crisis, and specifically mandating that the money be used to develop incentives to reduce the size of the workforce and to pay down its debt. so, madam president, i wanted to take this time today to explain this issue because i'm very concerned that there are members who are operating on the basis of a complete misconception that somehow this is a taxpayer bailout or taxpayer funds are being used for -- to repay this overpayment. that is not accurate, and this bill is very complicated, and i hope that we can stick to the facts as we debate it. people may have different views on the way forward, on the path forward, but i hope that we can keep this free from mischaracterizations about the bill. i

endorsed at the time" -- close quote, a requirement that the postal service agreed to, that they would prefund the future retiree health benefits of the current postal employees on an accrual basis. and that 2006 law set out a schedule of those required payments to the government. now six years later, the postal service does not want to make those required payments, or says they are unable to. we already enacted a bill last year partially relieving the postal service of some of their required 2011 payment, so this bill would defer those payments and stretch out the amount of time to pay them. how much is the postal service allowed to defer? $23 billion, almost, almost 23 more billion dollars. the legislation allows the postal service to defer $23 billion in payments for retiree health benefits. since the decision apparently that's been made and included in this legislation is that the users of the postal service, the stamp buyers, aren't -- shouldn't be required to pay this money. the idea is the taxpayers will pay the money. so the taxpayers will pay it. just pick it up. you know,ates tough t

i think they really don't fund prefunding issue. so if you take the language from the sflat and were able to get that merged in conference, it resolves the short-term for us but leaves the door open for us to also continue to widdle away at some of those long-term liabilities by negotiating a great health care plan for our employees that will provide better coverage at a lower cost and allows us to address some accounting issues and address medicare. that said on the house side they said you can go six to five days. you eliminate delivery door-to-door and our network runs, post office boxes and we'll continue to deliver packages. some of them may have a little surcharge, but it won't be outrageous and i think that's fitting in exact will where the american public looks for us to go. host: you can look for that full interview on sunday at 10:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. next a discussion with daniel schuman of the sunlight foundation on public accountability on federal spending and fawn johnson from the "national journal" joins us to talk a

i thought what your talking about is looking for a way to refund --prefund. i'll be happy to provide for the record of proposal that was developed by len berman, who used to run joint tax center, and a colleague of his at the urban institute that actually put forward the designs for theprefunding of services. i think that can be done. prfunding at all, which medicare was never designed to be, is challenging, because we tend to lend ourselves that money and we want to really put it away. that is the challenging part. but i would be happy to share that. >> i am sorry for taking so long. >> if you want to ask a couple of questions or make comments? go ahead. >> very kind of you. mr. coleman, we all know that medicaid was never intended to be the primary provider of long- term care coverage, yet medicaid is the largest pair of long-term care services. with long-term care accounted for almost half of national long-term care spending, as a former governor, and of giving our states the flexibility and resources they need to innovate is a first and critical step towa

the bill extends the payment schedule for the postal service to prefund its employee retirement benefits from 10 to 40 years. yes, the funding requirement is onerous, but if the usps cannot afford to pay for these benefits now, what makes it likely they will be able to pay later when mail volumes most likely have plummeted further? the bill also requires two more years of studies to determine whether a switch to five-day delivery would be viable. these studies would be performed by a regulatory body that has already completed a laborious inquiry into the subject of process that required almost a year. "the washington post" goes on to say this seems a pointless delay, especially given that a majority of americans support the switch to five-day delivery. finally, they go on to say there is an alternative a bill proposed by represented darrell issa that would create a supervisory body to oversee the postal service finances and if necessary negotiate new labor contracts. the bill is not perfect but offers a serious solution that does not leave taxpayers on the hook. so we now have a legislat

it will also reduce the requirement that the postal service prefund retiree health care benefits. i am very supportive of both of these provisions. , which will save the postal service over $15 billion over the next two years. however, i believe that the bill can be strengthened to maintain delivery standards and better protect rural post offices. i have been working with a group of my colleagues, including the presiding officer, led by senator sanders to improve the bill. i want to thank senators carper and lieberman for working with us. the managers' amendment addresses some of our concerns. most importantly, it would require the postal service to retain regional overnight delivery standards. this will protect many processing facilities and importantly for minnesota it will likely keep the duluth processing facility ol open. but the substitute still doesn't do enough to protect rural post offices. i have introduced an amendment bhie friends and colleagues, senators tester and levin, that will give communities the opportunity to fight to prevent the closure of their local post of

the bill extends the payment schedule for the postal service to prefund employee retirement benefits from 10 to 40 years. yes, the funding requirement is onerous but if the usps cannot afford to make these payments now what makes it likely they'll be able to pay later when mail volumes will have plummeted further? the bill requires two more years of studies. that's one of the favorite tactics around here, is more studies. two more years of studies to determine whether to switch to five-day delivery would be viable. i have to repeat that to my colleagues. we need to study for two years as to whether we need to reduce mail delivery from six days to five days. now isn't that marvelous? isn't that marvelous? two years to study. what it is, it's delaying what is absolutely necessary. and that is to have five-day week delivery. one of my colleagues said, well, it might keep someone from getting a newspaper in the mail. well, we're talking about $50 billion short, and we can't even reduce the number of days which has been recommended by the postmaster general himself. so we're going to have

endorsed at the time" -- close quote, a requirement that the postal service agreed to, that they would prefund the future retiree health benefits of the current postal employees on an accrual basis. and that 2006 law set out a schedule of those required payments to the government. now six years later, the postal service does not want to make those required payments, or says they are unable to. we already enacted a bill last year partially relieving the postal service of some of their required 2011 payment, so this bill would defer those payments and stretch out the amount of time to pay them. how much is the postal service allowed to defer? $23 billion, almost, almost 23 more billion dollars. the legislation allows the postal service to defer $23 billion in payments for retiree health benefits. since the decision apparently that's been made and included in this legislation is that the users of the postal service, the stamp buyers, aren't -- shouldn't be required to pay this money. the idea is the taxpayers will pay the money. so the taxpayers will pay it. just pick it up. you know,ates tough t