I'm starting to think we may have to eat the shit sandwich again after all

In case you thought that we might be able to survive four years of Mitt Romney:

Speaking at the Americans for Prosperity Foundation’s annual meeting, Mr. Romney said his plan would cap spending at 20 percent of gross domestic product by 2016, and would require $500 billion a year in spending cuts. To accomplish this, Mr. Romney explained, he would eliminate all nonessential government programs, including Amtrak, return federal programs like Medicaid entirely to the states and improve the productivity and efficiency of the federal government. He would also immediately cut all nonsecurity discretionary spending by 5 percent across the board.

Mr. Romney’s proposal for Medicare is similar to the hotly debated plan that Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, introduced in April. Mr. Ryan’s plan would replace Medicare and offer payments to older Americans to buy coverage from the private market.

Mr. Romney’s proposal would give beneficiaries the option of enrolling in private health care plans, using what he, like Mr. Ryan, called a “premium support system.” But unlike the Ryan plan, Mr. Romney’s would allow older people to keep traditional Medicare as an option. However, if the existing government program proved more expensive and charged higher premiums, the participants would be responsible for paying the difference.

He presented his plan as offering more choice — though younger Americans would need to be prepared to possibly pay more, for instance, depending on which plan they selected.

“Younger Americans today, when they turn 65, should have a choice between traditional Medicare and other private health care plans that provide at least the same level of benefits,” he said. “Competition will lower costs and increase the quality of health care.”

He concluded, “The future of Medicare should be marked by competition, by choice, and by innovation, rather than by bureaucracy, stagnation and bankruptcy.”

Yes, because health insurance companies are stumbling all over themselves to get your business, each one offering a better plan than the one before. And they're so innovative -- like the way they fight every claim just to see how long it'll take to wear you down before you stop fighting.

I've had a pretty decent health plan for Mr. Brilliant and I the last few years. We get it through my employer, so we're "only" paying about $3600 of the annual premium. It's got a $20 co-pay for preventive care, a $250 per person deductible, and covers 90% of "usual and customary" after that. Now "usual and customary" seems to be based on medical fees back in the days when Don Draper was taking little Sally to the pediatrician, but this plan has worked out OK for us.

So of course 2012 is the last year we'll have it.

After 2012, we'll be offered two plans -- an 80% plan with a low deductible, 80% coverage in-network and only 60% outside; or an high-deductible plan with an HSA. The difference in employee premiums is about $2000, so perhaps if I put that $2000 into the HSA along with the $500 the company will kick in, it'll offset most of the $2700 deductible for two people...assuming of course that we could pay for all $225 of your standard office visit out of the HSA, rather than the sixty bucks that in Insurance Delusionland is "usual and customary."

This is the world into which Mitt Romney wants to spill all the elderly. Oh he's making noise now about how there'll be a choice, but what senior citizen in his right mind would choose to try to buy an individual insurance policy instead of Medicare?

Keep in mind that Mitt Romney is worth a quarter of a BILLION dollars, and a health insurance premium is like lunch money to him.

And yet he and his buddies just can't kick even one more nickel apiece. Good heavens, no. After all, Mitt Romney worked so hard to get his money -- working hard to buy up companies, dismantle them, and throw their employees in the trash can. And the Koch brothers certainly shouldn't be asked to kick in anything else. After all, they're billionaires, which means they worked harder than we do, right? And the fact that they inherited their business from their father means nothing, right? How about the Walton children? They have $87 billion. And they made it by starting out as greeters, right? Hardly -- they inherited it from old Sam Walton. But they can't kick any more, can they? Not without extreme hardship.

After all, America has to be kept safe for the Walton children, and Prescott Bush's children, and George Romney's son, and Fred Trump's son, and so on.

And if that means that the poor and the sick and the elderly have to lay down and die, so be it.

So where does that leave us? Do we hold our noses and vote again for a President who's already shown that his futile, quixotic quest to be liked by a bunch of greedy, racist bigots is more important than anything to him? Do we stick with a bunch of corporatist Democrats who give lip service to the middle and working class but behind the scenes know full well that it's all over, and they're going to get their piece of the pie before it all goes to shit and the rest of us start killing each other for cans of baked beans?

In the past we could rely on Democrats to at least be the guardians of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, even if they sold us out on everything else. But thanks to the so-called "supercommittee", and Obama's willingness to let mandatory cuts kick in if this small group of intransigent Republians and sellout Democrats can't come up with a compromise (as if that were even possible), and this tendency they have to learn all the wrong lessons when they get clobbered and move even further to the right, it's hard to have any faith in them either.

So we're left with a choice -- we either let it all go to shit now, or have a few more tolerable years before it's all Mad Max.

Hardly what we had in mind in 2008, is it?

Eric Cantor shows that George Carlin was right.

I want you to bookmark this post, in which I once again note what George Carlin said back in 2005, barely three years before he decided he'd had enough of this Goddess-forsaken level of reality and checked out of this mortal coil. Bookmark it and watch it every single day for the rest of your life, just to make sure that you're not surprised when the social safety net is completely eliminated because we have to shovel more and more and more and more and more and more and more cash into the pockets of people who already have more than they can spend in 1000 lifetimes. At the very least, watch it every single fucking day until the 2012 eletion, just in case you're ever inclined to believe it again when Barack Obama says he's fighting for you, or Nancy Pelosi says NEXT time we'll draw a line in the sand. You can donate to Blue America candidates if you want, like I did yesterday because I wanted a shot at winning a Green Day-autographed Fender Stratocaster for Mr. Brilliant that he didn't even want because he has a Fernandes electric guitar that he insists is a nicer guitar than today's Strats, but that I figured we could sell and donate the proceeds to some worthy cause because while I adore my colleague whose 12-year-old loves Green Day, I'm not giving a 12-year-old a Stratocaster.

Anyway, if you're like me, you kept checking the bloodbath on Wall Street yesterday, wondering just how much less your retirement savings were going to be worth by the end of the day. I'm not going to say I've done everything right financially in my life. If I had back the money I spent on clothes I bought because they were on sale and never wore and eventually took over to the Caring About the Strays thrift shop I'd probably have at least a few thousand dollars to show for it. Seriously -- I've sold at least 36 pairs of leggings at garage sales for a buck a pair and still kept a few for working out. At one time I thought those were the only pants I'd ever be able to wear, so I bought them whenever they were ten bucks in the Newport News catalog. Then there's the small collection of antique cloche hats that I bought during my Roaring Twenties phase, and the Edwardian costume hats I bought during my Gilded Age phase, and all kinds of other assorted crap I didn't need. But while I didn't start putting any real money into 401(k) plans (yes, Gen-Xers, I came along too late for defined benefit pensions) until I was well into my thirties, I've been diligent ever since and lucky enough to work for employers for the last decade who also kicked in a fair amount. You see, I've always assumed that Social Secrity wouldn't be there for me, because Republicans have been making noise for the last thirty years that they want to get rid of it.

What I didn't bank on is that they also wanted us to get sick and die quickly once we reached a certain age. I know now that it was silly to think that way, especially since I knew that Republicans, blinded with greed as they are, HAVE no souls and HAVE no empathy with those who are poor, or elderly, or disabled. But would they be monsters enough to pull the rug out from the Federal health care system that provides medical care for those who could never possibly buy insurance on the open market, either because they are too sick already or because the actuarial tables don't favor them as profitable?

Well, now we know the answer. Yes they would. And that shandeh far di goyim Eric Cantor is leading the charge:

If you, like me, are over 55, do NOT take any comfort in Cantor's statement that you will be "indemnified" from being cast out on the street. The only thing that Cantor wants to "indemnify" is the Republican Party against a wholesale rejection by every single person in this country who is over 55. Because what Cantor is doing here is not just trying to shore up Republican support among the elderly and soon-to-be-elderly, but also to foment generational warfare. I mean, Gen X would line up all baby boomers against a wall and shoot us TODAY if they thought they could get away with it. What do you think is going to happen in the near-term future, as more Marco Rubios enter Congress, and the now-elderly boomers, having seen our retirement savings collapse and can't even vote anymore because we are now living on the streets, no longer have ANY political clout? If you're already on Social Security and Medicare today, they'll leave you alone because not even David Brooks would tolerate them yanking your benefits from you. But if you are NOT yet in the system, if you are age 61 or under, heed George Carlin's words: They're coming for your Social Security. If you are age 64 or under heed his larger point: they're coming for your Medicare. And the Democrats have proven with this debt ceiling cave-in that they will do absolutely nothing to stop them.

Raising the Medicare eligibility age is stupid and counterproductive

It's like making everyone who doesn't live in a a flood plain or hurricane-prone area wait 2 years to get homeowners insurance while taking all comers in Florida right away. The whole thing with insurance is that is spreads the risk. If Barack Obama is ready to bargain away Medicare kick-in at 65, he's capitulating to Teh Stupid for no reason at all.

Rick Ungar explains:

Not surprisingly, younger participants in Medicare spend a lot less of the government’s money than older beneficiaries simply because they don’t get sick as often as the older folks. By cutting out the youngest in the Medicare program – those who are 65 to 67 – the government would be kicking out the very beneficiaries whose monthly payments are most likely to stay in the system where their money helps to pay for the care of older participants. Why? Because these younger payers are less likely to require the government to make payouts on their own behalf.

In the meantime, the burden of insuring those who would be denied Medicare for a few years would fall to employers – assuming those over 65 can still be employed – where things can get pretty expensive when having to insure someone who is now in the very oldest employee demographic.

As for those who are no longer employed, it would get very scary as purchasing insurance at 65 can be an ugly adventure – even with the benefit of Obamacare.

I support the President in his willingness to make the hard decisions to get the country back on a sound financial footing. I’m even willing to consider changes in programs I very much believe in, such as Medicare, if those changes will preserve the program’s finances going forward.

But is it asking too much that if cuts are to be undertaken that the changes actually do something rather than simply appear to do something?

You'd think, wouldn't you? But when what we have is government-by-kabuki, the old rules no longer apply.

The New Deal: Sacrificed on the altar of Barack Obama's childhood emotional baggage -- or for his greed?

I don't know.

Maybe Barack Obama really in his heart still believes, despite being depicted as a monkey, the target of an e-mail depicting his parents as chimpanzees, called a liar in the middle of the State of the Union message, described with lynching metaphors by a leading presidential candidate, and a nonstop barrage of obstructionism by Congressional Republicans during the last two-and-a-half years, that he still can negotiate with Republicans; that he's so special that he can part the waters. Maybe he has some deep-seated self-loathing that's so pervasive that he gets some kind of perverse gratification out of being abused by Republicans.

Maybe he's even just doing what he's wanted to do all along -- set himself up for a nice cushy eight-figure job with an investment bank after he leaves office and join the ranks of the very people we elected him to keep under some kind of control.

Whatever it is, it's pretty clear that the poor and the elderly in this country are going to be sacrificed, not by some right-wing Republican greedmeister, but by a Democrat that those very poor and elderly elected:

President Obama is pressing congressional leaders to consider a far-reaching debt-reduction plan that would force Democrats to accept major changes to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for Republican support for fresh tax revenue.

At a meeting with top House and Senate leaders set for Thursday morning, Obama plans to argue that a rare consensus has emerged about the size and scope of the nation’s budget problems and that policymakers should seize the moment to take dramatic action.

As part of his pitch, Obama is proposing significant reductions in Medicare spending and for the first time is offering to tackle the rising cost of Social Security, according to people in both parties with knowledge of the proposal. The move marks a major shift for the White House and could present a direct challenge to Democratic lawmakers who have vowed to protect health and retirement benefits from the assault on government spending.

“Obviously, there will be some Democrats who don’t believe we need to do entitlement reform. But there seems to be some hunger to do something of some significance,” said a Democratic official familiar with the administration’s thinking. “These moments come along at most once a decade. And it would be a real mistake if we let it pass us by.”

Rather than roughly $2 trillion in savings, the White House is now seeking a plan that would slash more than $4 trillion from annual budget deficits over the next decade, stabilize borrowing, and defuse the biggest budgetary time bombs that are set to explode as the cost of health care rises and the nation’s population ages.

That would represent a major legislative achievement, but it would also put Obama and GOP leaders at odds with major factions of their own parties. While Democrats would be asked to cut social-safety-net programs, Republicans would be asked to raise taxes, perhaps by letting tax breaks for the nation’s wealthiest households expire on schedule at the end of next year.

The administration argues that lawmakers would also get an important victory to sell to voters in 2012. “The fiscal good has to outweigh the pain,” said a Democratic official familiar with the discussions.

Yup. Cuts to the social safety net that have been in place for decades and that keep the elderly from living out on the street are going to really be a big seller in 2012, especially in states like, oh, say, Florida, and North Carolina, where there are both a lot of retirees AND a lot of poor people. That's gonna go over BIG.

Americans have drunk the deficit kool-aid, but they don't really understand what the kind of BIG CUTS NOW they seem to be asking for are going to mean. A poll in March of this year showed that while 80% of Americans are concerned about the deficit, they oppose cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and K-12 education. Believe me, when Grandma has to move into a house where Dad has been out of work for two years and the family income is a third of what it was; where the son has been out of college for a year and is still working at the Piggly-Wiggly for $7.25 an hour because he can't find a programming job; where the daughter who's an A student is living at home and going to community college because the money that Dad and Mom had put away from her college lost 40% of its value during the 2008 financial crisis and still hasn't recovered -- because Grandma can no longer afford her apartment and food after her Social Security checks have been cut, families like that are going to find their concern with the deficit disappearing mighty quick.

Americans don't favor cuts to these programs, but they DO, contrary to the relentless drumbeats of Republicans, favor increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans, especially when the questions are framed as a choice between just cuts, just tax hikes, or a combination of both:

Several polls ask people if taxes should be increased on people who make more than $250,000. Polls show substantial majorities support the idea. We found majorities of 72 percent, 64 percent, and 59 percent. (Those are from April polls by ABC News/Washington Post, McClatchy-Marist, and USA Today/Gallup, respectively.)

On whether corporations pay enough in taxes, Gallup found that 67 percent said they pay too little.

Finally, we should note one area where we found contradictions on tax increases --in polls that ask people if they favor spending cuts, tax increases, or some combination thereof.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted at the beginning of May found that most people, 52 percent, favored a combination of cuts and tax increases. The NBC/Washington Post poll from April found that number was even higher, at 59 percent.

On the other hand, when you don't give people the option of both, they favor spending cuts over tax increases by significant margins. We found a Reuters/Ipsos poll from March that found people favored spending cuts over tax increase by 56 percent to 30, and a CBS News/New York Times poll from January that put it at 62 to 29.

But then we found polls that asked participants if they preferred cuts to benefits such as Social Security and Medicare over tax increases. In those cases, the results favored tax increases. The CBS News/New York Times poll found that 62 percent favored increasing taxes before Medicare benefits are cut.

The tax cuts that were instituted by George W. Bush in conjunction with his spending spree on two futile have been in place for a decade -- and there are still no jobs. But that isn't stopping Republicans from continuing the trickle-down meme that when the rich have stuffed all the cash into their pockets that will fit, they will start just tossing it on the floor in the form of jobs and let us pick up the scraps. The reality that we're seeing is that when their pockets are full, they just start stuffing cash into the pockets of another jacket.

And yet there is our President -- the one we elected in 2008, along with a Democratic Congress, to protect Social Security and Medicare, to protect public education, and to protect a woman's sovereignty over his own body -- selling us out on EVERYTHING.

Wo which is it? Are we once again dealing with a president who's willing to sacrifice a nation to his primal childhood wounds, or just another greedy asshole who rode a Trojan Horse into the White House?

What part of this is so difficult for the punditocracy to understand?

There's still this delusion in this country that the people who have populated the Sunday gasbag shows are somehow "smart" or "informed" or "knowledgeable." The week-long flogging (sorry) of the recent Weiner weiner "controversy" shows you that the Washington press corps has a lot more in common with TMZ and Perez Hilton than with any kind of policy analysis. And yet the Usual Suspects who populate Morning Schmoe continue to insist that the Paul Ryan If You Still Can't Afford Or Get Private Insurance Then Fuck Off And Die Plan is a "serious" plan for "reforming" Medicare.

Paul Krugman once again explains today in the New York Times what a government check to buy health insurance from companies that can reject you for any reason, charge you exorbitant premiums if they take you, and drop you at any time for any reason (because "take all comers" is part of the Affordable Care Act that Ryan wants to repeal) will mean in real life for real people:

Medicare is a government-run insurance system that directly pays health-care providers. Vouchercare would cut checks to insurance companies instead. Specifically, the program would pay a fixed amount toward private health insurance — higher for the poor, lower for the rich, but not varying at all with the actual level of premiums. If you couldn’t afford a policy adequate for your needs, even with the voucher, that would be your problem.

And most seniors wouldn’t be able to afford adequate coverage. A Congressional Budget Office analysis found that to get coverage equivalent to what they have now, older Americans would have to pay vastly more out of pocket under the Paul Ryan plan than they would if Medicare as we know it was preserved. Based on the budget office estimates, the typical senior would end up paying around $6,000 more out of pocket in the plan’s first year of operation.

By the way, defenders of the G.O.P. plan often assert that it resembles other, less unpopular programs. For a while they claimed, falsely, that Vouchercare would be just like the coverage federal employees get. More recently, I’ve been seeing claims that Vouchercare would be just like the system created for Americans under 65 by last year’s health care reform — a fairly remarkable defense from a party that has denounced that reform as evil incarnate.

So let me make two points. First, Obamacare was very much a second-best plan, conditioned by perceived political realities. Most of the health reformers I know would have greatly preferred simply expanding Medicare to cover all Americans. Second, the Affordable Care Act is all about making health care, well, affordable, offering subsidies whose size is determined by the need to limit the share of their income that families spend on medical costs. Vouchercare, by contrast, would simply hand out vouchers of a fixed size, regardless of the actual cost of insurance. And these vouchers would be grossly inadequate.

Mr. Brilliant and I have insurance through my employer, which has just made available a full wages and benefits statement so that we know at any time just what the company pays for the various benefits we have. The health plan we have, which pays 90% of "usual and customary" (read: ridiculously low) to in-network providers with a $500 per person deductible every year but covers preventive procedures such as mammograms and colonoscopies and routine physical exams at 100% to in-network providers, costs about $13,000/year. I pay about $3600 of this premium.

An individual policy at this level would cost far more. Perhaps some of you who DO purchase individual policies might want to weigh in with what your coverage is and at what cost. I'm guessing that right now, at my age, a similar policy would probably cost upwards of $20,000/year -- if we could even get one. Now imagine me in ten years, at age 66, trying to buy an individual policy from an industry that has been cherry-picking for years.

Republicans are painting the Ryan plan like an all-you-can-eat buffet, in which America's senior will have a vast array of health insurance "products" from which to choose, offered by a wide variety of providers who are just salivating at the thought of getting hold of all those people who are going to need actual payouts for health care. In what kind of universe does anyone actually believe this to be true?

Can we please stop saying that Medicare won't change for anyone 55 and over?

The Republican meme on Medicare seems to be that the Ryan plan won't eliminate Medicare because no one CURRENTLY IN THE PROGRAM will be affected. Of course, if you are NOT currently on Medicare, then all bets are off. "But the Ryan plan keeps everyone over 55 on the current program!", you might say, or might have heard. But here's the problem: Do you honestly think that Gen-X voters are going to allow the current Medicare program to stay intact when the late-year boomers and themselves will not be able to obtain benefits? As I've written before, I have FRIENDS who are Gen-Xers who blame us for everything, and it's only a short path from "All boomers voted for Reagan" to "Why should you get something I don't" to "Why don't you all just fucking die already?"

It's only a matter of time.

The evil genius of the Ryan plan is that it gets those pesky elderly voters -- those currently in the existing program -- off their backs and hopefully away from the polls in the immediate future, under the assumption that "greedy geezers" won't care about whether their children and grandchildren are able to rely on obtaining medical care in their old age. It remains to be seen whether this is a valid assumption, but 57% of those polled in a recent Kaiser Health survey favor keeping Medicare as a guaranteed plan.

What we don't know is how that number would be affected if people understood that the "vouchers" in the Ryan plan would cover less than 1/3 of the cost of the average health insurance plan, that their value would NEVER be increased, and that the Ryan plan contains NO requirement that insurance companies from which the elderly would now be trying to buy policies "take all comers." Because the repeal of the Affordable Care Act that is also part of the Republican agenda, current safeguards against cherry-picking would disappear, meaning that the nation's elderly would now receive vouchers that don't cover anywhere near the cost of premiums, let alone care itself, to buy insurance from private for-profit companies that don't want CHILDREN with health problems, let alone the elderly.

The Ryan plan is relying on "I Got Mine And Fuck You" for support. The question is whether voters are going to take their attention away from Anthony Weiner's penis long enough to understand how Paul Ryan essentially wants the nation's citizens, once they become elderly, to do as former Rep. Alan Grayson so succinctly put the Republican health care plan, "die quickly."

And if you think you are off the hook because you are 55, remember: Gen-X is right behind us, and all to many of that cohort would be perfectly happy to have us dead NOW.

The Daily Weiner

My Congressional Hero (at least until Grayson wins again):

You can't vote to keep subsidies to Big Oil and then say that the sick elderly have to sacrifice

Americans clearly have no sense of what a trillion dollars is, nor do most people realize where their tax dollars go. Ronald Reagan succeeded in convincing most Americans that "Federal spending" = "Welfare for lazy minorities in Cadillacs", and ever since then, Republicans have been able to frame their particular cause in terms of what it costs taxpayers. Federally-funded abortions. Food assistance for the poor. Museums devoted to the mating habits of the hedgehog. The result is that Americans have no idea what the government spends, and overestimates the spending on the trivial:

According to a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday, most Americans think that the government spends a lot more money than it actually does on such unpopular programs as foreign aid and public broadcasting.

The poll's release comes one week before current funding for the government runs out. If there is no budget agreement between congressional lawmakers by next Friday, some government programs and offices may shut down.

"The public has a better idea of how much the government spends on programs like Social Security and Medicare, but there is a related problem - cutting them has little public support," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "The result: cutting unpopular programs would probably not cut the deficit very much, and cutting the deficit would probably require cuts in programs that Americans like."

Let's start with international assistance. Sixty percent of people we questioned say they'd like to put foreign aid on the chopping block. So would that make a dent in the deficit?

No - but try telling that to the American public. According to the poll, on average, Americans estimate that foreign aid takes up 10 percent of the federal budget, and one in five think it represents about 30 percent of the money the government spends. But the actual figure is closer to one percent, according to data from the Office of Management and Budget from the 2010 fiscal year's $3.5 trillion budget.

OK. Let's try more low-hanging fruit - funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Our survey indicates nearly half of all Americans would like to see major cuts.

According to our poll the public estimates that the government spent five percent of its budget last year on public television and radio.

Not even close. The real answer is about one-tenth of one percent.

And so on.

What Americans DO know is what the government spends on Social Security and Medicare, but as stupid and self-sabotaging as average Americans have become, they haven't become THAT stupid and self-sabotaging. And when Republicans continue to insist that tax increases are off the table at the same time that corporations are paying little or no taxes AND getting refunds on taxes they didn't pay, they are not going to get Americans to agree with cuts to Social Security and Medicare. When Republicans continue to insist that tax cuts to the wealthiest people create jobs after the tax cuts instituted by George W. Bush at the same time as he was spending us into oblivion on two futile wars have been in place for a decade and there are still no jobs, they are not going to get Americans to agree with cuts to Social Security and Medicare:

Most Americans say they don't believe Medicare has to be cut to balance the federal budget, and ditto for Social Security, a new poll shows.

The Associated Press-GfK poll suggests that arguments for overhauling the massive benefit programs to pare government debt have failed to sway the public. The debate is unlikely to be resolved before next year's elections for president and Congress.

Americans worry about the future of the retirement safety net, the poll found, and 3 out of 5 say the two programs are vital to their basic financial security as they age. That helps explain why the Republican Medicare privatization plan flopped, and why President Barack Obama's Medicare cuts to finance his health care law contributed to Democrats losing control of the House in last year's elections.

Medicare seems to be turning into the new third rail of politics.

"I'm pretty confident Medicare will be there, because there would be a rebellion among voters," said Nicholas Read, 67, a retired teacher who lives near Buffalo, N.Y. "Republicans only got a hint of that this year. They got burned. They touched the hot stove."

Combined, Social Security and Medicare account for about a third of government spending, a share that will only grow. Economic experts say the cost of retirement programs for an aging society is the most serious budget problem facing the nation. The trustees who oversee Social Security and Medicare recently warned the programs are "not sustainable" over the long run under current financing.

Nearly every solution for Social Security is politically toxic, because the choices involve cutting benefits or raising taxes. Medicare is even harder to fix because the cost of modern medicine is going up faster than the overall cost of living, outpacing economic growth as well as tax revenues.

"Medicare is an incredibly complex area," said former Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., who used to chair the Budget Committee. "It's a matrix that is almost incomprehensible. Unlike Social Security, which has four or five moving parts, Medicare has hundreds of thousands. There is no single approach to Medicare, whereas with Social Security everyone knows where the problem is."

It turns out that when there is a program that benefits people who Americans perceive as having been hard-working, especially when everyone has already paid into that system, they do not want the budget balanced on their backs while the CEO of Exxon Mobil gets to buy himself another yacht in an attempt to fill the hole in his soul.

How about we do something to keep people healthier during their working years so that they can be healthier in their senior years? Perhaps if workers actually have time for fitness in their day instead of working 100-hour weeks to prove their value to the company, we'll have fewer obese adults. Perhaps if people in poor neighborhoods can buy quality foods for a reasonable price there won't be as much Type 2 diabetes. Perhaps if we acknowledge just how difficult quitting smoking is and finding ways to make it easier to quit smoking without risking telling the wrong person to go to hell in the middle of a meeting, there will be fewer lung cancer deaths. Perhaps if we make towns bicycle- and walk-friendly, people will get out of their cars more often. Perhaps if we stop trying to be "the most productive nation in the world" while working our citizens into early health problems, we can spend less per capita on Medicare.

But that's not likely to happen, because those who rely on Medicare now and in the future don't buy politicians. Corporations do.

Maybe it really IS time to buy a gun

No, not for self-defense, and not to hunt the increasing number of deer and foxes that we're finding here in the suburbs. No, it's so we can put the barrels into our own mouths and pull the trigger if we get sick. Because the alternative is living on the street because we have no money left after trying to buy private health insurance with Paul Ryan's coupons when we're old:

There's nothing false about the claim that Ryan's plan would end Medicare as we know it. In fact, it's unambiguously true. Currently, Medicare is a government-run insurer that pays the health-care costs of all senior citizens. Under Ryan's plan, senior citizens would be given vouchers that they could use toward private insurance. Poor seniors would get more-generous vouchers, and rich seniors would get less-generous vouchers. The way Ryan saves money is by holding the growth of the vouchers beneath the growth of health-care costs, so as care costs more and more, the vouchers cover less and less.

Republican Medicare Snake Oil

Paul Krugman on the Republican talk out of both sides of their mouths on Medicare:

“Don’t cut Medicare. The reform bills passed by the House and Senate cut Medicare by approximately $500 billion. This is wrong.” So declared Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, in a recent op-ed article written with John Goodman, the president of the National Center for Policy Analysis.

And irony died.

Now, Mr. Gingrich was just repeating the current party line. Furious denunciations of any effort to seek cost savings in Medicare — death panels! — have been central to Republican efforts to demonize health reform. What’s amazing, however, is that they’re getting away with it.

Why is this amazing? It’s not just the fact that Republicans are now posing as staunch defenders of a program they have hated ever since the days when Ronald Reagan warned that Medicare would destroy America’s freedom. Nor is it even the fact that, as House speaker, Mr. Gingrich personally tried to ram through deep cuts in Medicare — and, in 1995, went so far as to shut down the federal government in an attempt to bully Bill Clinton into accepting those cuts.

After all, you could explain this about-face by supposing that Republicans have had a change of heart, that they have finally realized just how much good Medicare does. And if you believe that, I’ve got some mortgage-backed securities you might want to buy.

No, what’s truly mind-boggling is this: Even as Republicans denounce modest proposals to rein in Medicare’s rising costs, they are, themselves, seeking to dismantle the whole program. And the process of dismantling would begin with spending cuts of about $650 billion over the next decade. Math is hard, but I do believe that’s more than the roughly $400 billion (not $500 billion) in Medicare savings projected for the Democratic health bills.

[snip]

In the Ryan proposal, nobody currently under the age of 55 would be covered by Medicare as it now exists. Instead, people would receive vouchers and be told to buy their own insurance. And even this new, privatized version of Medicare would erode over time because the value of these vouchers would almost surely lag ever further behind the actual cost of health insurance. By the time Americans now in their 20s or 30s reached the age of eligibility, there wouldn’t be much of a Medicare program left.

But what about those who already are covered by Medicare, or will enter the program over the next decade? You’re safe, says the roadmap; you’ll still be eligible for traditional Medicare. Except, that is, for the fact that the plan “strengthens the current program with changes such as income-relating drug benefit premiums to ensure long-term sustainability.”

People planning to vote this November ought to listen to Republicans are saying before casting their ballots, because rest assured -- Republican power means an end of -- not just a change to, but an end of Social Security and Medicare. Even as the financial markets show a new period of volatility and retirement savings among both the young and the old have not yet recovered from the Bush financial meltdown, Republicans are still extolling the Magic of the Markets to bring riches to the working class. Perhaps what they're trying to do is shore up the market returns of their constituency with Social Security funds designed for those they regard as simply the unwashed masses. And as for Medicare, they're talking out of both sides of their mouths -- Don't cut Medicare, cut Medicare. It remains to be seen if this line of reasoning is going to fly.

The Republicans have been trying to dismantle Social Security since it was first enacted in the 1930's, and Medicare since its founding in 1965. That. Does. Not. Change.

Ever.

Seniors who are shrieking at tea bag rallies and town halls are in for a rude awakening

You've got to love the "Don't let the government get its hands on my Medicare" crowd. That's the kind of sound bite that so beautifully encapsulates the willful ignorance of people who think with their jerking knees. Republicans, with their "pull the plug on Grandma" rhetoric, are making some headway in convincing seniors that it's they who are the guardians of Medicare while the Obama Administration and the Democrats want to destroy it. This is what happens when we forget history, or never learn history, or are too incurious to take history and place it in context as part of a continuum leading to the present day.

Sometimes I wonder what my late father-in-law would have made of all this. He was a son of Italian immigrants, and as wingnutty a wingnut, as racist a racist as you'll find. This was a guy who had a photograph of Ronald and Nancy Reagan sitting on top of the TV on which he watched Fox News.

DougJ over at Balloon Juice wrote yesterday about the syndrome of people who were discriminated against when they first came over aspiring to reach the point of finding someone else to shit on. My father-in-law was one of these guys. A funny thing happened to him, though, after his health started to go and he spent more time in hospitals: He began to realize that Medicare was not a Communist plot to turn us into the Soviet Union, but a vital service on which he could rely when he became ill. Some of his mellowing was because he moved to the Jersey shore, where he squired around the widows of his friends who had predeceased him instead of spending ALL his time feeding Fox Hate Network into his head. But some of it is the realization that perhaps something run by the government isn't so bad that for many people only comes when they need it. It didn't hurt either that for the first time in his life, he was actually interacting with people who were from groups he'd always hated -- Black and Hispanic and Filipino nurses. I remember seeing him joking and flirting with a black nurse in a way he never would have when he was well.

I often wonder what he would have made of what's going on now, whether his mellowing would have continued or if he would have remained stuck in right-wing ideology about health care. I wonder if he would have been one of those people screaming "Keep the government's hands off my Medicare!" at Congressional town halls. It's hard to imagine he would; the man wasn't stupid. But I wonder what kind of hoops he WOULD have jumped through to protect his Reaganite worldview.

Reality is going to smack them hard across the face, should these people decide to turn Congress over to the Republicans in 2010. Because Republicans may be playing to their fears about Medicare now in an effort to keep health care in the hands of for-profit insurance companies, but once they succeed in that, Medicare will have outlived its usefulness to them.

Jacob Weisberg, in Newsweek:

The republicans charge that Democratic health care reform would, in Sen. Charles Grassley's words, "pull the plug on Grandma." According to Sen. Jon Kyl, the bills before Congress would ration medical treatment by age. Rep. John Boehner says they promote euthanasia. Sarah Palin has raised the specter of "death panels." Such fears are understandable. It's not preposterous to imagine laws that would try to save money by encouraging the inconvenient elderly to make an early exit. After all, that's been the Republican policy for years.

It was Grassley himself who devised the "Throw Mama From the Train" provision of the GOP's 2001 tax cut. The estate-tax revision he championed will reduce the estate tax to zero next year. But when it expires at year's end, the tax will jump back up to its previous level of 55 percent. Grassley's exploding tax break has an entirely foreseeable, if unintended, consequence: it incentivizes ailing, elderly rich people to end their lives—paging Dr. Kevorkian—before midnight on Dec. 31, 2010. It also gives their children an incentive to sign DNR orders and switch off respirators in time for the deadline. This would be a great plot for a P. D. James novel if it weren't an actual piece of legislation.

[snip]

Other GOP policies promote death for senior citizens with more modest incomes. Take George W. Bush's failed plan to privatize Social Security—a program that has driven life expectancy up and death rates down since it was instituted. It has an especially pronounced impact on suicide rates for the elderly, which have declined 56 percent since 1930. Had Bush prevailed, those who gambled on the stock market and lost would be less able to afford medicine, food, and heating for their homes. In aggregate, they'd likely die younger and commit suicide more often.

Republicans continue working to short-en and sadden the lives of the elderly in more oblique ways, too. One of President Obama's first official acts was to reverse Bush's executive order limiting government funding for stem-cell research, which remains the most promising avenue for new treatments of diseases that afflict the aged, including Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Clean-air legislation, which the Republicans defeated in 2002, has the potential to save 23,000 lives per year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Many of those victims are elderly people, who suffer disproportionately from cardiovascular and respiratory illnesses exacerbated by air pollution. Because emissions of carbon monoxide and such are merely a contributing factor, you can't name the individuals who have died because of this policy choice. But it's reasonable to deduce that there are tens of thousands of people who would still be elderly today if Republicans didn't value the rights and campaign contributions of polluters more highly than their lives.

If the Democrats were even a tenth as savvy about the reptilian brain as Republicans, they'd use this reality. But because they are gutless, lazy, AND as much in the pocket of the insurers as the Republicans, they won't. And all those elderly people and the near-elderly screaming about socialism are going to find themselves living their own nightmare very soon.