Republicans Voted to End Medicare

This, according to Politifact, is 2011's "Lie of the Year." Which is unfortunate because it's true.

Indeed, Politifact's Lie of the Year article seems to acknowledge as much in describing the object of Democratic scorn, the GOP's FY2012 budget proposal (associated with House Budget chairman Paul Ryan):

Introduced by U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the plan kept Medicare intact for people 55 or older, but dramatically changed the program for everyone else by privatizing it and providing government subsidies.

If the difference between the situation for those subject to the GOP's plan and those who are exempted from it (i.e. those 55 or older) is that Medicare is "kept intact" for the latter, the point has been conceded. The clear implication, of course, is that Medicare is not kept intact for those young enough to be subject to the GOP's plan. And indeed it isn't.

So, despite Politifact's self-congratulatory and sanctimonious follow-up to the outcry over their mystifying choice in which they blame the ideologues of the "Echo Chamber Nation" for not recognizing how their "independently researched information" has "disrupted the status quo," the essential facts remain:

	Medicare	GOP (Ryan) Budget
Public health insurer (CMS) exists	✓	x
Gov't reimburses doctors and hospitals for medical services rendered to seniors	✓	x
Guaranteed benefit	✓	x
Seniors must look for private commercial insurance plan	x	✓

Medicare is a public health insurance plan that pays seniors' doctor and hospital bills. The fact that it reimburses providers directly is part of its great power. It can thus tell hospitals that if they want to receive reimbursements from it, the hospitals must provide emergency stabilizing care regardless of citizenship or ability to pay. It can subsidize graduate medical education by folding extra money directly into its reimbursements. It can jumpstart a health information technology revolution by offering bonuses to participating doctors and hospitals who start using electronic health records. It can provide incentives for providers to offer higher-value care and begin changing the ways they deliver that care.

Those things are all gone under the GOP's budget, which instead pushes future seniors to look for Anthem or Aetna or some other private plan if they want coverage. Not right away--which is the only point Politifact even tries to offer in its own defense. Because the proposal grandfathers in existing beneficiaries and people within 10 years of becoming eligible for Medicare, the program doesn't end overnight. It dwindles over time as, starting in 2022, no one is allowed to enroll in it and those grandfathered into it die off or are squeezed out of it by a shrinking provider network and rising premiums.

Yes, it's phased out instead of abruptly eliminated. But last I checked, phasing something out is still ending it. And as Politifact implicitly conceded, under the GOP's proposal Medicare is no longer intact for future generations. So I'm afraid it's true. In April 2011, the Republicans voted to end Medicare.

Times is Hard

Shocking and yet somehow utterly unsurprising.

'Dismal' prospects: 1 in 2 Americans are now poor or low income

WASHINGTON - Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans — nearly 1 in 2 — have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income.

The latest census data depict a middle class that's shrinking as unemployment stays high and the government's safety net frays. The new numbers follow years of stagnating wages for the middle class that have hurt millions of workers and families.

"Safety net programs such as food stamps and tax credits kept poverty from rising even higher in 2010, but for many low-income families with work-related and medical expenses, they are considered too 'rich' to qualify," said Sheldon Danziger, a University of Michigan public policy professor who specializes in poverty.

"The reality is that prospects for the poor and the near poor are dismal," he said. "If Congress and the states make further cuts, we can expect the number of poor and low-income families to rise for the next several years." [...]

About 97.3 million Americans fall into a low-income category, commonly defined as those earning between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level, based on a new supplemental measure by the Census Bureau that is designed to provide a fuller picture of poverty. Together with the 49.1 million who fall below the poverty line and are counted as poor, they number 146.4 million, or 48 percent of the U.S. population. That's up by 4 million from 2009, the earliest numbers for the newly developed poverty measure.

I don't want to read too much into Obama's Osawatomie speech last week yet but it's a positive sign that maybe, just maybe, we'll see a strong Democrat on the campaign trail who isn't afraid to talk about frightening levels of inequality.

Now, this kind of inequality -- a level that we haven’t seen since the Great Depression -- hurts us all. When middle-class families can no longer afford to buy the goods and services that businesses are selling, when people are slipping out of the middle class, it drags down the entire economy from top to bottom. America was built on the idea of broad-based prosperity, of strong consumers all across the country. That’s why a CEO like Henry Ford made it his mission to pay his workers enough so that they could buy the cars he made. It’s also why a recent study showed that countries with less inequality tend to have stronger and steadier economic growth over the long run.

Inequality also distorts our democracy. It gives an outsized voice to the few who can afford high-priced lobbyists and unlimited campaign contributions, and it runs the risk of selling out our democracy to the highest bidder. (Applause.) It leaves everyone else rightly suspicious that the system in Washington is rigged against them, that our elected representatives aren’t looking out for the interests of most Americans.

But there’s an even more fundamental issue at stake. This kind of gaping inequality gives lie to the promise that’s at the very heart of America: that this is a place where you can make it if you try. We tell people -- we tell our kids -- that in this country, even if you’re born with nothing, work hard and you can get into the middle class. We tell them that your children will have a chance to do even better than you do. That’s why immigrants from around the world historically have flocked to our shores.

And yet, over the last few decades, the rungs on the ladder of opportunity have grown farther and farther apart, and the middle class has shrunk. You know, a few years after World War II, a child who was born into poverty had a slightly better than 50-50 chance of becoming middle class as an adult. By 1980, that chance had fallen to around 40 percent. And if the trend of rising inequality over the last few decades continues, it’s estimated that a child born today will only have a one-in-three chance of making it to the middle class -- 33 percent.

It’s heartbreaking enough that there are millions of working families in this country who are now forced to take their children to food banks for a decent meal. But the idea that those children might not have a chance to climb out of that situation and back into the middle class, no matter how hard they work? That’s inexcusable. It is wrong. (Applause.) It flies in the face of everything that we stand for. (Applause.)

Now, fortunately, that’s not a future that we have to accept, because there’s another view about how we build a strong middle class in this country -- a view that’s truer to our history, a vision that’s been embraced in the past by people of both parties for more than 200 years.

Late Night DS9

I'm working my way through Deep Space Nine and I just got to my favorite episode of the first season, Duet. The series itself picks up shortly after the end of a four decade occupation of one world by another. Duet probes some of the backstory and very clearly establishes the parallel with the Holocaust. The former occupiers, the Cardassians, are transparent analogs of the Nazis, having brutally pushed their victims, the Bajorans, into forced labor camps and engaged in a genocidal campaign against them.

This particular episode is about the apparent capture of a Cardassian war criminal, the former commander of a concentration labor camp during the occupation. As the episode title suggests, the episode revolves around the interaction of one of the series' main characters (a Bajoran woman who fought in the resistance against the occupiers) and the Cardassian prisoner. A great episode and the performance from the "Butcher of Gallitep" is especially fantastic.



Well worth watching, particularly for the payoff at the end, if you haven't seen it before.