Tag: medicare

If you replace a system that actually pays seniors’ medical bills with an entirely different system, one that gives seniors vouchers that won’t be enough to buy adequate insurance, you’ve ended Medicare. Calling the new program “Medicare” doesn’t change that fact.

Paul Krugman, reflecting on the Village Edict that Democratic claims that the GOP plans to “end” Medicare are misleading.
The stupidity of our discourse truly knows no bounds. Yes, a program called Medicare exists in the Ryan Plan. But that is where the similarities end. That realizing this requires reading even an executive brief of said Ryan Plan is why the Village will never, ever come to know this.

Shocking News about Gang of Six

A bipartisan effort to rein in the national debt stalled Tuesday, as members of the Senate’s so-called Gang of Six signaled that an agreement is unlikely to come this week in time for the start of White House-led budget talks.

Also unlikely to come in the weeks following the start of White House-led talks. And in the months and years after that. And, you know, forever. Just like the Baucus-led Gang of Whateveritwas on healthcare reform, these talks were never going anywhere. Ever. They were solely an attempt to get >50% of the Ryan plan and then stamp it with the Broder-approved Seal of Bipartisanship. And then demand another 20-30% on top of that “bipartisan” plan when the mess hit the floor. Period. That is all that was ever going on in there. All that is going on in there.

Though never mentioned in the mainstream media, there is one party, the GOP, that has categorically ruled out any revenue increase from any source and intends to “balance” the budget by eliminating Medicare, fundamentally ending Medicaid, and then passing those “savings” on to the very rich in the form of more tax cuts. And then, of course, raise the debt ceiling to pay for it by borrowing ever-more. This is their plan. Magically, they also plan to reduce all government spending to levels below what just the military consumes today. And this all seems likely to the Serious People. Sensible and courageous, even.

Notable that Tom Coburn, one of the vanishingly few people with ® after their name that actually accepts revenue probably has to increase, has suddenly left town. Shocking. I’m sure it’s truly pressing business back home.

Can we finally be done with time-wasting and air-sucking idiocies such as the Gang of Six and, for that matter, all these other “Gangs of” now and forever? I know Serious People love their Gangs, but there simply is no middle ground, or anything approaching “middle ground” between Ryan and the status quo. There just isn’t. And though Serious People will never, ever accept it, sometimes doing nothing is indisputably the best way forward when faced with intransigent and unthinking opposition such as that presented by the modern GOP.
In this case, doing nothing fixes at least half of our budget problem. But let’s not talk about that. Everyone knows that Medicare has to go away. Anything less would destroy America.

All I have to say is: All hail gridlock!

Shocking News about Gang of Six

Yelling at Congresspeople

squashed:

The summer before last, Republican groups made huge political gains by showing up at Townhall meetings and acting atrociously. Now Democrats want to do the same thing.

They shouldn’t.

When I saw that MoveOn.org was organizing the same sort of events to target Republicans, I initially felt a certain glee. This will go well for the left. Then I remembered the August 2009 town halls meeting I attended. I am wholly in favor of constituents challenging their representatives—even if it makes the representatives uncomfortable. I have little use for any sense of propriety that gets in the way of a robust and honest political dialog—but what happened at that townhall meeting wasn’t political discourse.

It was base. It was incoherently mean, screamingly ugly. The same hateful energy responsible for every crime ever committed by a mob was on display. It was the sort of event that makes you wonder whether humanity was a mistake.

Now MoveOn.org will unleash the same sort of nastiness at the Republicans. It will capture a media narrative. It will be good for the Democrats in 2012. But it will be bad for the country. They shouldn’t do it.

Presumably it all depends on how it’s done. The reason the Tea Klan stuff was so ugly (to me, anyway) was the pure low-information spectacle of it all; the purest example of this being stuff like “keep your guvmint claws off my Medicare” and the like. If MoveOn shows up and just screams people attending and the House member running the thing down: then Squashed and I are in complete agreement, it will have been a bad idea and bad for long-term political discussion in the country.

But, if MoveOn shows up and states the case, calmly and upon a foundation of facts-based disagreement (e.g. the GOP plans to end Medicare in every meaningful way; however, a program called Medicare will still be there and here is a partial list of the reasons that move will be very, very bad deal for the elderly and infirmed…): then it is all for the good.

Beating a Dead Hobby Horse

jeffmiller:

[…]Challenged to produce an actual plan, Obama produced rhetoric.  

As opposed to Ryan’s plan and its magical unicorns based solutions? Honestly and specifically please detail exactly which programs and federal initiatives Ryan is specifically cutting to get spending to 3% of GDP? Are you aware that current military spending is all on its own consuming about 3% GDP? It’s no coincidence that the only specifics in Ryan’s plans are the tax cuts to the wealthy and the functional elimination of Medicare and Medicaid. That’s all he cares about. Deficits don’t even enter into it; that’s why the plan so brazenly doesn’t even bother to pretend it’s really lowering deficits. Only the math addled beltway media seems to think it will do anything but increase deficits. Instead, Ryan’s plan is all about undoing a social contract that’s been in place for nearly a century. Anything else that happens, any outcome for good or ill is simply window dressing and utterly unintentional. The elder poor will kindly go die in the streets, as the plutocrats need that money.

[…]

Obama is different president than I expected him to be.  I expected him to be a pragmatic crusader, but he’s not really that.  Were he a crusader, he’d better exploit his bully pulpit.  

Clinton, I think, was driven by power.  Obama doesn’t seem that interested in power … he’s more interested in importance.  Or rather, I think Obama wants to feel important. Wielding power is one way to feel important, but so is talking about wielding power.  And lest you think that talk isn’t important, remember that our warmongering President won a Nobel Peace prize as a result of his talking.  I think that prize was terrible psychologically for our President, in the same way that our election was terrible for him too.  He was elected without actual achievement, and he was given a Nobel Prize without actual achievement … naturally, he’s learned that actual achievement isn’t that important.  That’s not a good lesson for a President to learn.  

Sorry, but this is simply horseshit. Obama won a Peace Prize because of his talking? I’m fully aware that he has no negro dialect, but Barack Hussein Obama won a Peace Prize because he’s a black man who was elected President of the United States of America, which only 150 years ago fought a war over the “states’ rights” to allow its citizens to own other human beings who just so happen to share an ethnic background with Obama. He furthermore won that election by means of the first non-plurality (e.g. true majority election) that’s occurred in this country in decades. This apparent non-achievement was deemed utterly impossible and was the subject of utter “no Serious Person can believe this is possible” derision as recently as 20 years ago when Jesse Jackson was running regularly. But, yeah, total non-event.
And, oh my stars, a Peace Prize recipient is presiding over killing and wars! To the fainting couch! I’m sure they’ll get around to the W Bush statues in our new and wonderful Peace Spring Eternal Middle East any day now.

All that aside, maybe it’s escaped your memory that Obama was also elected a United States Senator. Now that’s suddenly not an actual achievement? I guess ACORN rigged it up for him then too. But which high national office did George W. Bush hold before being elected President? Clinton? Jimmy Carter? Gerald Ford? I must be forgetting all their reams of national-level elected experience before landing the top job.

Finally, and most importantly, anything Obama proposes as “deficit policy” is actually unnecessary. While his plan includes specifics, why even bother? Leaving aside that the GOP House will simply shitcan his stated preferences as a starting point (even if said stated preferences are/were the GOP priorities of that morning), please do recall that doing nothing at all will largely solve this issue in short order. Thus Obama can sit back, veto extensions of the Bush tax cuts and watch the budget come into balance. Period. Or, using parts of the Bush tax cuts as leverage, he can perhaps shape some sort of policy compromise that suits his desired outcome.

And that’s the key. His desired outcome. If we’ve learned anything about this President, it’s that Obama is interested in outcomes. He could care less about tilting at preferred policy windmills, plaudits, power, and most problematic of all: the credit for any of it. For example, Obama has lowered taxes and reduced the size of government, but seems to be going out of his way not to tell anyone. Most polls show people believe the opposite is true on both counts. Even more importantly, though, his administration managed to pass the ACA, which likely will prove to be the single most important legislative achievement of my lifetime when all is said and done.

But, yeah. He’s not achieved anything.

I’d advise you to get some new hobby horses. These are very tired indeed. Maybe try “where’s the long form!?!” on for size.

Rightward Lurch

And so it begins:

Obama will not blaze a fresh path when he delivers a much-anticipated speech Wednesday afternoon at George Washington University. Instead, he is expected to offer support for the commission’s work and a related effort underway in the Senate to develop a strategy for curbing borrowing. Obama will frame the approach as a responsible alternative to the 2012 plan unveiled last week by House Republicans, according to people briefed by the White House.

Just as we predicted a few days ago, your choices, the entire extent of the debate will be between a center-right proposal (Simpson-Bowles) and a far-right proposal (Ryan plan). Where do you think the Serious Person “sensible middle ground” will be in that fight? Left unsaid will be any discussion of the true driver of deficits: individual healthcare costs. Left unsaid will be: if we had individual health costs of any other Western democracy we’d be facing surpluses and not deficits. Limit rate of growth in healthcare and you fix everything we’re currently fighting over, and without doing it on the backs of the poorest.

It’s now down to just how much of Medicare we will eliminate (er: “privatize”) and what percent of older Americans still get access to it. Then, a couple of years down the road: fewer. In a few more years: gone, because it only serves the poor and they don’t vote. Legislative inertia is literally the only chance that program has for survival.

The old will kindly go die in the streets.

Medicare and the Overton Window

This Pelosi post got me thinking about just what a Democratic response to a Ryan-style plan on Medicare should even be. After all, if you work from Ryan’s far right starting point and counter with “well, let’s just privatize x% of Medicare for this set of individuals” or some other “sensible middle” type compromise, then you’ve already lost. You’ve advanced the GOP’s idea of the program (which is a bad one) significantly and at the expense of the better solution: Medicare as it stands or Medicare plus substantial improvements.

It is a fact that the real driver of deficits in this country are healthcare expenses. Don’t take it from me, here’s the CBO’s report (PDF link):

Medicare and Medicaid are responsible for 80 percent of the growth in spending on the three largest entitlements over the next 25 years and for 90 percent of that growth by 2080.

But if we could achieve the per patient healthcare cost of most of the other developed nations in the world, we’d be facing yawning surpluses in this country, not deficits, and we’d very likely have better individual health outcomes to boot.

Therefore: the Democratic response to Ryan’s “privatize Medicare” should in fact be: Medicare For All. Period. We don’t want to reduce this program. Like 87% of all Americans, we think it should at the bare minimum stay just as it is. Preferably, we’d like to massively expand it. This has the dual benefit of covering medical expenses for everyone in the country and relieving the number one deficit driver in the economy: everyone’s medical expenses. Plus this means we eliminate the dread ACA and its totalitarian horrors. Everyone wins!

Now, of course, I don’t really think Medicare For All has any particular chance of becoming law; what using this sort of proposal does do is set the limits of the debate more appropriately and in ways that tend to favor outcomes preferable to the Democrats.
On the right: Eliminate Medicare and let the wealthy fend for themselves.
On the left: not only keep Medicare, but make it the healthcare provider for all, with tremendous humanitarian benefit but also knock-on budget benefits.
Then you’d be down to arguing about whose plan actually saves more money long term and how that impacts health outcomes in America. Which is precisely where the debate needs to be.

Never. Is never good enough for you?

Nancy Pelosi on when the Democratic plan to destroy Social Security would be introduced. This is the sort of Democrat we need a whole lot more of.
And, as Atrios notes, the Bush administration hadn’t yet even offered their plan and wouldn’t, really, until after the whole thing was effectively dead. They were, in fact, counting on that Defeatocratic impulse to get out there and co-own a truly terrible idea just because the Serious People wanted them to. For once, they didn’t do it. That’s true leadership.

It’s Courageous To Go Die in the Streets

David Brooks:

Today, Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, is scheduled to release the most comprehensive and most courageous budget reform proposal any of us have seen in our lifetimes….His proposal will set the standard of seriousness for anybody who wants to play in this discussion….This budget tackles just about every politically risky issue with brio and guts….Paul Ryan has grasped reality with both hands. He’s forcing everybody else to do the same.

Kevin Drum responds:

Courageous. Serious. Gutsy. I imagine that within a few days this will be the consensus view of the entire Beltway punditocracy. A plan dedicated almost entirely to slashing social spending in a country that’s already the stingiest spender in the developed world, while simultaneously cutting taxes on the rich in a country with the lowest tax rates in the developed world — well, what could be more serious than that?

I think I’m going to be sick.

He’s right, but it didn’t take a few days and it’s not just Our Punditocracy; here’s the generic Democrat legislator last night on Hardball (sorry, no transcript yet):

[it was] “courageous” [for Paul Ryan to put up a plan to abolish Medicare and other federal social programs]

This is deadly serious. It’s easy to say we drugged bloggers out here are simply another example of the smelly hippies flying off the handle on something. Rest assured: We are not. You are going to be fighting 100% of the GOP caucus, some non-zero percent of the Democratic caucus (exactly 100% of the Democrat caucus), the entire Beltway elite media, and the do-nothing defensive crouch of the President and his administration heading into 2012. Keep in mind where that “sensible compromise” is going to land when the Overton Window has been set far, far to the right. Every possible outcome other than status quo within the current frame of the debate is going to be a major GOP win, far beyond anything that’s happened in recent political history. And that’s with a Democratic Senate and a Democratic President faced with a politically daunting 87% public approval of either continuing or increasing Medicare coverage relative to today’s levels. This is why they fail.

It’s going to be just like the Social Security fight, only worse: once again, Very Serious People will pretend not to notice that the Republican plan is a giant game of bait-and-switch, dismantling a key piece of the social safety net in favor of a privatized system, claiming that this is necessary to save money, but never acknowledging that privatization in itself actually costs money. And we’ll have endless obfuscation, both-sides-have-a-point reporting that misses the key point, which is that the putative savings come entirely from benefit cuts somewhere in the distant future that would, in all likelihood, never actually materialize. (What do you think will happen when retirees in 2025 discover that their Medicare vouchers aren’t enough to buy insurance?)

Paul Krugman, on the coming Medicare privatization fight. Add to that an administration that has shown zero interest in coming out of a defensive crouch on such issues, even when 87% of Americans favor keeping Medicare as is or increasing funding.
And, just to get a sense of where the MSM and its serious people are going to come down on the issue, you might review how that overwhelming majority of Americans favoring the continuation and expansion of Medicare is played. tl;dr: second to last paragraph, after about 17,000 words on how Americans “flunk” the budget test. Newsflash, CNN: your own poll shows they know that Medicare is relatively costly; however, they see the value of not putting folks over 65 out there on a competitive market with a fixed amount of 2010 dollars with which to try and find care. But, by all means, journalistic integrity means playing up that folks overestimate our outlays in foreign aid as a cudgel against their views on (and apparently clear understanding of) Medicare funding. Might those sad rubes out there in the many diners of flyover country be conflating military spending with “foreign aid?” We shall never know.
It aint going to be pretty.