For those of you who may be unaware, the House yesterday passed a budget that would turn Medicare into a voucher system for those currently under 55. Only four Republicans voted against it.
Several commentators have stated that this provides the perfect opportunity for the Dems to bludgeon the GOP with their actions, as seniors tend to vote in greater numbers than anyone else.
Here’s one such opinion piece from Salon:
I fear, however, that the Dems will drop the ball on this. For one thing, they’re too insistent these days on playing nice. Another thing, they’ve done a pretty shitty job in recent years of getting their message out.
But then again this Medicare plan may just prove too big a target not to take advantage of. The GOP may finally have pissed off the wrong people.
Will they use it successfully? I don’t know. The GOP used the $500 billion in cuts to medicare advantage pretty well in 2010.
I can’t say for sure. My faith in (swing) voters to comprehend the issues and in democrats to message is both fairly low.
They aren’t just privatizing medicare though. They want to increase the age to 67, and they want a voucher system of $15000 per person per year. Finding health insurance in 2011 for $15000 a year for an elderly person with numerous pre-existing conditions will be near impossible.
Even state plans, which are heavily subsidized by taxes, charge 1-2k or so a month for those 55-64 who have pre-existing conditions. You can assume the premiums for a 70 year old will be far higher than 15k a year. And that will be for a plan with a 5k deductible.
Also medical insurance premiums go up 10-30% a year, medical inflation is about 7% a year, but the voucher (I believe) only keeps up with inflation of about 2-3% a year. It saves money by throwing the elderly to the wolves and dumping all the risk and cost onto them. There is no way I’d want to live in this country beyond age 60 if this passed.
Uh, are any of you under some kind of impression that Democrats have never used Medicare as a wedge issue in prior elections? I’m willing to say that it has been used in EVERY election in recent history.
However, nobody builds a campaign around MediScare – erhm, Medicare. It’s a great issue to divide senior citizens from the GOP, but the next election is going to be about the economy. Yes, Dems will use this stupid plan against Republicans, but the message is going to be jobs, jobs, jobs.
Eh, they managed to hang Bush’s Social Security plans around the necks of the GOP pretty well. And that was far less of a roll-back then Ryan’s plan. And it wasn’t attached to a plan that not only cut entitlements, but did so to finance tax cuts for the rich. I think the Ryan plan will end up being a pretty big blunder for the GOP, especially given that it doesn’t really have any chance of becoming law.
Plus, despite their image as weak morons, the Democrats have managed to win the popular vote in four out of the last five Presidential elections, and picked up a net positive number of seats in roughly half of the Congressional elections over the same time period. So whatever you may say about the Dems, their reputation for political ineptitude is overblown.
Saying it turns it into a voucher system is a little misleading. It does have vouchers, but most of the savings are from the value of the vouchers being much less then the cost of insurance. So the main change isn’t the vouchers, the main change is that the gov’t will no longer cover the bulk of the medical expenses of the elderly.
Sure it’s going to hurt the Republicans. Everybody wants to reduce the national debt and have a balanced budget…until it affects them.
And yes you old codgers, you need to chip in also. Most of you have already received more benefits than money you have put into the system throughout the years.
The Ryan plan doesn’t effect the current set of “old codgers”. They will continue to not chip in. The only difference is that non-retired people will be asked to continue chip in for a plan they will never benefit from, as it will be phased out by the time they retire.
So you can see why I’m skeptical this is a political winner for the GOP.
What a double edged sword for the Republicans. They want old people to die before they require too much money to care for, but they need (presumably living) old people to keep voting them into office. What a conundrum!
The Dems certainly can use it, but more likely they’ll continue taking the approach that “If your opponent is shooting himself in the foot, let him”. Approval ratings are showing that to be pretty effective.
Marginally related (and probably apocryphal) story that usually gets told to young computer science majors:
Supposedly when computers first started being widely used, the UK gov’t bought a large one and tried putting a very detailed model of the UK economy and gov’t budget into it, to try and run various optimization routines to find the best ways to save money. The result was that the computer decided the best way to save money was to spend less on street signs and pedestrian crosswalks. This puzzled the bureaucrats, since the total budget for such things was pretty small.
Upon further analyzing the computers logic, the found out that it had discovered that fewer crosswalks would mean that more elderly would be killed, hence saving the gov’t billions in pension payments.
