House Republicans pass a controversial budget ending Medicare and Medicaid as we know it. They may have gone too far. — By David Corn
Lemmings, meet cliff.
That's one way of viewing the 235-to-193 party line vote in the House of Representatives on Friday afternoon for the 2012 budget proposed by Rep. Raul Ryan (R-Wisc.), the chair of the House Budget committee.
Ryan's plan has become the latest front in Washington's budget wars, following the tussle over the 2011 budget that ended in a bipartisan deal that included $38.5 billion in spending cuts. This current round—which precedes the coming fight over raising the national debt ceiling—is more perilous for the Republicans, for the Ryan proposal presents the Republicans in all their Republicaness, as the party that wants to end Medicaid and Medicare as these programs currently exist (that is, wipe out the guarantee of medical care for the poor and for the elderly), while tossing a trillion dollars in tax cut bonuses to well-to-do Americans. (Only four House GOPers voted against the measure.)
With this vote, the GOP is embracing the caricature of itself: telling the poor they'll have to do with less, throwing granny out of the hospital bed, and easing life for gazillionaires. Of course, the party claims its proposed "reforms"—doling out block grants to the states to cover some of the costs of health care for the poor and employing a privatized voucher system for the elderly that won't provide any guarantee of medical services—will strengthen Medicaid and Medicare. And it's again wheeling out its argument that restoring tax rates from the booming 1990s will impede economic growth.
But essentially the Republican Party is resorting to the same-old same-old: market fetishism and trickle-down economics—and accusing President Barack Obama and others who link the GOP's Medicare and Medicaid cuts to tax breaks for billionaires of engaging in "class warfare." (Apparently, it is not class warfare to squeeze the poor and the elderly to create fiscal room for tax cuts for the wealthy.)<...>
Round 2 is not so abstract. The main targets are front and center, and when it comes to Medicare, voters really care.
The Republicans seem to know this.
Last year, they ran attack ads against Democrats assailing the Ds for supporting Obama's health care initiative, which included hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicare savings that the GOPs blasted as "cuts" that would threaten the program. Yet now they are proposing a far more radical change that would eviscerate Medicare's foundational premise: guaranteed service. In Ryan's Brave New World, future seniors (people who are now below the age of 55) would be handed vouchers they can use to obtain insurance, which may or may not cover all the health care they need, and they would have to pay thousands of dollars more per year to cover their medical bills.
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