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“Opponents of health-care reform should be chanting "No more Medicare!"The arguments that have been made against the public option (a health
insurance plan sold and administered by the federal government) apply
with equal or greater force to Medicare.”
That's from economists Simon Johnson and James Kwak. Let’s get this straight: Health care reform does not involve cutting Medicare benefits. Medicare is the second most-beloved Government program. Medicare is also a public option. GOP opponents of health reform have been falsely saying reform will cut Medicare benefits. This is not true.
In 1965, Conservative Ronald Reagan was running for Governor of California. He was violently opposed to Medicare, which was then the hot policy battle. The debate cut much along the same lines as the health care debate today, except that during the Cold War, “socialism” was even more loaded a term, and back then, opponents used "red menacing" tactics to scare people away from Medicare. Here’s Reagan, trying to scare people against supporting President Johnson’s Medicare program:
"One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people, has been by way of medicine. It's very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project — most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can't afford it. Now, the American people, if you put it to them about socialized medicine and gave them a chance to choose, would unhesitatingly vote against it."
In fact, LBJ passed Medicare, but it was Richard Nixon who
“recast the entire concept of national health insurance, creating a new model that kept employer health care in place, covered the poor and the old and gave people who weren’t covered national health insurance. Before that, most people who wanted national health insurance wanted a single-payer Medicare system for all. But this mixed model has been embraced by Carter, Clinton, Obama and all the Democratic hopefuls who ran on health care—Kerry, Dukakis, Mondale. They’ve all borrowed from Nixon, who wrote up this idea on his yellow legal pads.”
The above is all from James Morone and David Blumenthal’s new book, The Heart of Power. They show us that we've really been here before. Except that luckily, the right side won in the Medicare debate of the sixties.
Right now, “on Fox News' Hannity, GOP consultant Frank Luntz forwarded the false conservative talking point that President Obama plans to cut Medicare benefits, claiming that it "is almost like he's declaring war on Medicare because it's the only way for him to pay for health care.”
The non-partisan FactCheck.org noted: "The claim that Obama and Congress are cutting seniors' Medicare benefits to pay for the health care overhaul is outright false."
Here is the truth:
The truth is that the pending House bill extracts $500 billion from projected Medicare spending over 10 years, as scored by the Congressional Budget Office, by doing such things as trimming projected increases in the program's payments for medical services, not including physicians. Increases in other areas, such as payments to doctors, bring the net savings down to less than half that amount. But none of the predicted savings -- or cuts, depending on one's perspective -- come from reducing current or future benefits for seniors.
AARP says: Fact: None of the health care reform proposals being considered by Congress would cut Medicare benefits or increase your out-of-pocket costs for Medicare services. [FactCheck.org, 8/14/09]
Find out yourself. BlogHer’s partnership with the Sunlight Foundation and OpenCongress.org means we can track the bills. And, most importantly, we can follow the health care money. Next time you hear anti-reform words coming out of a politician’s mouth, click on over and see just how much money they’ve accepted from the health insurance lobby.
And while you’re at it, I cannot recommend enough this segment with Wendell Potter, former Corporate Communications Chief at health insurance giant Cigna: “Profits before Patients.” But don't expect to get through it without steam coming out of your ears. I listened to the podcast and used it to fire me through a run I'd not been able to do before!!!
