Medicare and Mediscares

From the New York Times, my favorite Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman on the recent GOP attempts to gut Medicare:

Mr. Ryan may claim — and he may even believe — that he’s facing a backlash because his opponents are lying about his proposals. But the reality is that the Ryan plan is turning into a political disaster for Republicans, not because the plan’s critics are lying about it, but because they’re describing it accurately.

Take, for example, the statement that the Ryan plan would end Medicare as we know it. This may have Republicans screaming “Mediscare!” but it’s the absolute truth: The plan would replace our current system, in which the government pays major health costs, with a voucher system, in which seniors would, in effect, be handed a coupon and told to go find private coverage.

The new program might still be called Medicare — hey, we could replace government coverage of major expenses with an allowance of two free aspirins a day, and still call it “Medicare” — but it wouldn’t be the same program. And if the cost estimates of the Congressional Budget Office are at all right, the inadequate size of the vouchers — which by 2030 would cover only about a third of seniors’ health costs — would leave many if not most older Americans unable to afford essential care.

And

In fact, it wasn’t really a deficit-reduction plan. Once you remove the absurd assumptions — discretionary spending, including defense, falling to Calvin Coolidge levels, and huge tax cuts for corporations and the rich, with no loss in revenue? — it’s highly questionable whether it would reduce the deficit at all.

What the Ryan plan is, instead, is an attempt to snooker Americans into accepting a standard right-wing wish list under the guise of deficit reduction. And Americans, it seems, have seen through the deception.

More here.

Right. If you're actually serious about reducing the deficit, the first thing you want to do is get the economy revved up again such that more people are working and earning bigger incomes, which necessarily results in higher tax revenues. Indeed, as Krugman keeps reminding us, in addition to the reckless spending of the Bush years, on war and non-negotiable drug prices for senior citizens, the biggest factor increasing the deficit is the Great Recession, which has reduced government income on a massive scale.

But nobody in Washington really seems all that interested in getting people back to work. Instead, they want to gut the social safety net, Republicans because they just don't like the idea of a social safety net, and Democrats because they're stupid cowards. I mean, none of them actually say this. To them, it's all about being "serious" or about being "grownup." Hell, many of them have probably actually convinced themselves that this is what it's all about. But it's not. Nobody really gives a shit about the deficit. Republicans just want to fuck people over and Democrats are afraid of Republicans. That's what it's all about.

So there's this GOP Medicare "plan," which is increasingly looking like a deadly albatross around Republican necks, that its supporters insist is not destroying but rather modifying the very popular government program. This is, of course, a total lie, and it is only thanks to the resounding success of Medicare over the years that Americans immediately see such bullshit for what it is--I mean, Medicare is popular with everybody, from black and white to rich and poor, by and large because, unlike the private health care regime most Americans under 65 suffer, Medicare works, and it positively affects virtually the entire population. If it was a smaller scale program, one that only affected a much smaller percentage of the population, the GOP might have been able to get away with it. But no. The Republicans, drunk with a false sense of success based on national discontent with Obama's wishy-washy pro-corporate health care reform mixed with outrage over his being bedfellows with the banking sector, went for the knockout.

Instead, they've fallen flat on their faces. How long will it be before the Democrats fritter away yet another golden opportunity offered up by their opponents? I'd say about five minutes.

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