Throw down the crutch of Medicare!
by Tom Sullivan
Reports of Medicare's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Jeb! Bush doesn't seem to have gotten the memo, however. His people quickly backtracked after he suggested, "We need to figure out a way to phase out the program for others." (Those not already receiving benefits, of course.)
Paul Krugman was looking at the trend lines at his blog over the weekend. He provides some nifty charts to illustrate just how the health care cost curve has indeed been bent. Projections for runaway growth have all but vanished since passage of the Affordable Care Act:
The truth is that there never was an entitlements crisis. But now there isn’t even an excuse for pretending that such a crisis exists.
But then, who said the right needed an excuse, good or otherwise? Krugman finishes the thought in his Monday column:
The real reason conservatives want to do away with Medicare has always been political: It’s the very idea of the government providing a universal safety net that they hate, and they hate it even more when such programs are successful. But when they make their case to the public they usually shy away from making their real case, and have even, incredibly, sometimes posed as the program’s defenders against liberals and their death panels.
What Medicare’s would-be killers usually argue, instead, is that the program as we know it is unaffordable — that we must destroy the system in order to save it, that, as Mr. Bush put it, we must “move to a new system that allows [seniors] to have something — because they’re not going to have anything.” And the new system they usually advocate is, as I said, vouchers that can be applied to the purchase of private insurance.
Vouchers, yes. With tax cuts, vouchers are the miracle elixir of conservative economics. Throw down those crutches of Medicare and public schooling, my boy! Nothing better than vouchers and tax cuts for curing what ails ya, save a clean bowel, an economic Road to Wellville, where...
the spirits soar, the mind is educated, and the bowels - - the bowels are born again!