REPORT: The 46 Year-Long Republican War On Medicare

By Zaid Jilani

Paul Ryan (podium) with fellow GOP liars and criminals. Naturally, they all express admiration for Ronald Reagan, perhaps one of the most malignant politicians in American history.

LAST WEEK, in a dramatic vote, the House of Representatives voted to effectively end Medicare by voting for Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget proposal. Under Ryan’s plan, the public health insurance system known as Medicare would be replaced with a system of inadequate subsidies seniors would use to purchase private insurance.

All but four House Republicans voted for Ryan’s plan. Since the vote, Republicans have been engaged in a major public relations effort where they are claiming they actually are “saving Medicare” by ending its status as public health insurance program and handing seniors over to insurance companies. Yet Main Street Americans don’t appear to be buying the GOP rhetoric, as they are angrily confronting Republican Members of Congress at their town hall events, demanding to know why they want to end Medicare.

But if Americans want to know why Republicans are so eager to kill Medicare, they should look to the party’s history with the popular program. Leading Republicans actually denounced the program as it was being designed, warning that it would take us down the road to totalitarianism or worse, and other leading Republicans were caught on record plotting to eliminate it after it was created:

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4/15/2011]

In his 2008 film SiCKO, filmmaker Michael Moore featured Ronald Reagan’s campaign against Medicare. Watch it:

It should truly come as no surprise that the GOP has always set its sights on Medicare. After all, it is a single-payer health care system has little involvement from the private insurance industry that is both incredibly efficient and remarkably popular among the general public. It completely violates the conservative mantra that the market should be the arbiter of all things.

Polling shows that the public, including even most Republicans, are overwhelmingly opposed to cuts to the Medicare program. The public is, however, supportive of measures like drug reimportation from Canada and authorizing the Medicare program to use its purchasing power to negotiate for lower drug prices, something that should be uncontroversial but that has been barred thanks to the power of the drug industry. Both of these policy options could save Americans billions of dollars and help shore up the long-term sustainability of Medicare.

The Congressional Budget Office concluded in its study of Ryan’s plan that if it was enacted, seniors would have to pay the majority of their income on health care. In its 46 year-long war on Medicare, the GOP is not only fighting the public health insurance program, but the very idea that we are our brother’s keeper — that we should care what happens to our elderly in the last years of their life, and that no one should spend the last days of their lives fighting with insurance companies just to survive.

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