Republicans Abolish Medicare
Well nearly anyway.
The only purpose of the vote in the House today was to pass the much hyped Ryan plan to “save” Medicare. For save read abolish. The vote was along purely party lines as we would expect. Or almost: four GOP members bravely voted against, two abstained. So now the Republicans are on record as wanting to dismantle one of our most popular programs.
The question then is: why?
The Ryan plan, like all his plans, depends on fanciful accounting, deceit, sleight of hand, and all the accoutrement of Merlin’s bag of tricks. It boils down to a very simple equation: by shifting the responsibility of payment to the elderly themselves it rids the government budget of the burden of health care, and thus magically eliminates much of the long term deficit. The elderly would be forced to find private health care insurance that they pay for by cashing in the vouchers they receive from the government. Hey presto. Privatized health care and no deficit. That no cost is squeezed from the economy, or that the economic burden is not changed at all doesn’t matter. The only goal is to rid government of any role in health care. That the big problem of escalating costs remains unresolved doesn’t enter the equation. We will leave that solution to the elderly themselves. Who, in true Ayn Rand fashion, will be left to fend for themselves. No other nation on earth actually proposes abandoning its elderly like this. Then again no other nation on earth is so pathologically incapable of embracing community spirited solutions to its problems.
There is no guarantee that the vouchers would pay for all the care the elderly are now receiving. Indeed, all the analysis so far tells us that the amount of coverage would drop quickly. This has to be the case if the idea is to lower government costs: the vouchers have to end up being a lesser cost than the current system. So the elderly will end up paying for that extra care from their own pockets. What a shock. Plus there are early signs that most insurance companies would not offer policies anyway. The elderly are exactly the sort of high cost population that private insurers typically avoid like the plague. Being old is a pre-existing condition. The kind that makes insurance companies run for the hills. Thus the Ryan plan is likely to throw a ton of our old folks into the arms of either charity, destitution and illness, or family. How quaintly rugged of the GOP. How uncaring. How, well, Republican.
Nothing could be more anti-social or extreme. Nothing could conform more closely to the nasty world of Ayn Rand. The entire plan is mean spirited and reckless in its disregard for either the health or the wealth of the old people of America. And it leaves the big problem: health care cost unresolved. Sleight of hand meets anti-social deviancy.
Then again, like all Ryan plans, it is difficult to tell exactly what the plan will do since details are sparse and examples non-existent. So I may be over-reacting.
Maybe.
But when faced with what appears to be a freakishly stupid and bizarre attack on one of the country’s most diligent voting blocs it is hard to tell what the goal was. Clearly the GOP is so self-regarding and obsessed with its anti-social agenda that it cannot understand just how unpopular this plan would be were it ever explained to the public. In one recent poll only 3% of voters thought Medicare needed to be abolished. A large majority wanted to leave it as is, despite the cost. Oddly, it was Republican supporters who were most critical of cost cutting in health care. So how the GOP gets from these kinds of polling results to making abolition a major plank of its election campaign I don’t know. Stubbornness?
Obviously the abolition of Medicare has been a long desired goal of the right wing. They abhor government to an extraordinary degree. Irrationally so, since there is plenty of evidence from all around the world that the most cost effective health are systems all involve some form of government control, if only to exploit the negotiating advantage it has with drug companies.
To compound matters, the GOP tips its pro-corporate hand when its plan includes specific language preventing the government from using that negotiating power. The only explanation for such a ban is that the Republicans feel more strongly about pharmaceutical company profits than they do about the provision of health care. No news there I suppose.
So here we are. The great war over eliminating our safety net is underway. The steady movement of the GOP to the extreme far right has produced this struggle. As recently as Nixon the Republican mainstream defended the safety net – albeit reluctantly – rather than despising it. The Reagan revolution ended that and hurled the GOP out into its current hardline world where it willfully ignores the social ramifications of its ideological hatred for the people of America.
Average families matter not one whit to these crackpots. There is nothing bold nor clever about being so despicable and mean spirited. Ryan is a lightweight who never provides any back up to his ideas yet manages to get praise from the knee jerk press trying to locate a balance in any and every discussion.
Of course today’s vote changes nothing since there are nowhere near enough votes for the Ryan plan to get past the Senate and then withstand Obama’s inevitable veto.
Which gets us back to the beginning. Why? Why would they vote this plan through? It hands the Democrats an enormous election platform boost.
The only explanation is, as I mentioned, that the GOP is so severed from reality, and so assured of its extreme ideology, that it doesn’t see the dangers of being both blatantly and obsessively anti-social.
I have long argued that the country needs to have a clear and well defined debate about its social structure. For way too long the Republicans have said one thing – that they hate the safety net – and done another. Don’t forget it was Bush 2 who added enormous amounts of coverage and cost to Medicare just a few years ago. They have never actually had the courage to run in an election on a platform of its abolition. So, perhaps, I am all wet. I am not giving Ryan credit. He is steering us towards just such a debate. He is bold. He does think big. He is a big bold psychopath.
He wants to abolish Medicare. The voters don’t. In an election I wonder who wins? We do, I hope.
Addendum:
Oh. I forgot to make clear that this vote was on the entire bold, new, and exciting Ryan plan to slash government spending and get unemployment down to the unheard of level of 2.8%. Magic indeed. So I must also have forgotten to point out that the attack on the elderly and their beloved Medicare is necessitated by the much greater need – in Republican eyes – to lower tax rates on the wealthy. The plan is designed to allocate wealth from sick old people to hale and hearty rich people. The plan doesn’t even try to hide this awesome demonstration of raw red meat Ayn Rand inspired inversion of seventy years of policy objective.
Which raises an interesting issue: the cumulative value of the spending cuts in the Ryan plan are almost exactly the same as these tax cuts. So it is neutral with respect to the deficit. How it goes on from there and “slashes” that deficit is shrouded in mystery.
But a bold mystery. And bold is all that counts in Ryan-land.
