SAVE MEDICARE BY DESTROYING IT

From a Houston Chronicle op-ed piece by Craig Hines:

To begin with, a Republican-driven bill to "improve" Medicare is impossible. Republicans, especially the conservative wing of the party in power, are historically opposed to Medicare.

"This is not a complex story," said Theodore R. Marmor, a professor of public policy and political science at Yale University, who has, in fact, written the book on Medicare. At Medicare's inception, in 1965, "the simple truth is that it was a fight between basic fundamental Republican and Democratic beliefs about the role of government." That has not changed much, but because Republicans now do not want to attack the program directly, they adopt what Marmor calls "the My Lai answer: We have to save Medicare by destroying it as we know it." The idea that a good solution will be half way between Tom DeLay and Ted Kennedy is, Marmor said, "a recipe for stupidity."

That raises a pretty good question: how can a political party that believes, as conservative idiot-god Ronald Reagan once said, that “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” be trusted to do anything but tear down the government?

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