Here's the forest:
The political discussion must be divided into two segments: 1) prior to beginning of the Democratic presidential 2012 campaign and 2) 2012 campaign, which began this month, IMO. Polling indicates Obama has been to the right of middle America on taxing the rich, fighting for the middle class, etc. So Obama is now targeting his rhetoric to Democrats and independents. Politicians are generally better judged by their governance mode than their campaign mode, so I will only address Obama on his actions prior to the “pivot” to campaign mode.
Obama was dealt the worst economic hand since FDR and he has played it very badly. He has, like Neville Chamberlain did with respect to fascism in the 1930s, engaged in a capitulation strategy which only empowers the enemy.
Medicare and Medicaid are extensions of the New Deal in the sense of broad safety net. I consider them, like Social Security to be the at the core of Democratic values. We have a Democratic President proposing large cuts in Medicare, including cost increases to old people and others on fixed incomes. This is obscene.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/us/politics/medicare-and-medicaid-face-320-billion-in-cuts-over-10-years.htmlThe cost of American health care is over twice per capita that of any other G20 country. There has been no significant effort to address cost of health care and HCR did nothing about it. Major provisions of HCR were suggested by the enemy (big health care), e.g mandatory health care for all citizens. This actually enables predatory pricing and is indicative of the strategic naivete of Obama.
Increasingly, the entire safety net is on the table, this is because the RW agenda is marching US history in that direction. While many congressional Democrats oppose this, the debate has been clearly led by the RW because of a lack of White House leadership on health care, the deficit “crisis,” etc.
There is no clear message of reality from the White House: there has been a massive transfer of wealth to the 1% , exacerbated by the lack of regulation. The sacrifice must be borne by them in the crisis created by them. Our over sized military spending makes us weaker economically and makes us less secure by enabling terrorism to become more widespread and popular among oppressed nations. The only way to lessen our debt problem is to increase revenue by taxing the super rich and putting people back to work with clean energy jobs.
Now as to the trees.
Where is the faulty analysis you allude to?
I am all for the reduction of fraud and waste in government, as well as big business. But the meat ax approach taken in this instance punishes for-profit and non-profit nursing homes which played no part in the fraud. This is from your cited link:
Nursing homes say Medicare has gone too far. “We are appalled,” said Larry Minnix, chief executive officer of Leading Age, the Washington lobby group for not-for-profit homes. A cut “of this magnitude is unprecedented,” he said in a statement. The group had pushed Medicare to close what Minnix called billing loopholes instead of make a broad cut.
The Service Employees International Union wanted to limit cuts to for-profit nursing home companies that Medicare said were driving the billing. The across-the-board cuts will unfairly penalize not-for-profit homes, the group said in a statement. “Its rate reduction fails to solve the real problem and instead punishes all nursing homes for the bad actions of a few,” said President Mary Kay Henry.
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