The Quiet Plan to Kill Medicare

Amy Traub

The Quiet Plan to Kill Medicare

President Bush's new health care proposals have so many destructive features it took DMI nine pages to outline them all in our State of the Union rapid response last month. And we were really trying to brief. But it appears that the President didn't even mention all of the harmful plans he has in store for the nation's health care system. Like getting rid of Medicare as we know it.

You read that correctly. The President's proposed 2008 budget includes a plan to do away with Medicare.

Why haven't you heard this before? On his blog, "Beat the Press" economist Dean Baker takes the media to task for failing to report on the plan to phase out one of the nation's most crucial -- and treasured -- public programs even as he cogently explains just how the President aims to drive guaranteed health care for our nation's seniors into the sunset. The plan involves means-testing many Medicare benefits so they won't be available to anyone making over $80,000 a year. That income level isn't indexed to inflation, so over the years the income threshhold will drop in real terms, reducing Medicare to a program for only the poor, then only the very poor... and Medicare is gone as a vital support for all seniors.

Yes, this is the same President who just expanded Medicare with a flawed and yet hugely expensive prescription drug benefit. And it's the same President who just said in his State of the Union that "when it comes to health care, government has an obligation to care for the elderly." So maybe it's no surprise that he didn't announce his plan to wriggle out of that obligation in the very same speech. And maybe the media figures that the President's plan to gradually eliminate the program more than 40 million seniors rely upon for their health care would never be enacted, or would be repealed or adjusted before it had a chance to fully decimate Medicare. But as Dean Baker points out, under Bush's plan "many middle income elderly people would face the loss of their Medicare subsidy before Social Security faces any funding shortfall" and we've all heard the hue and cry about the 'crisis' facing Social Security.

Contrast the media's (lack of) coverage of the planned phase-out of Medicare with the response to presidential candidate John Edwards' plan for universal health coverage. A look at the headlines suggests the most important thing about Edwards' plan is not that it would cover every American by 2012, or that it builds on the current employer-based system, or even that it would be more affordable for the middle class. Instead headline after headline trumpets the fact that his plan involves a tax increase (really a repeal of the Bush tax cuts for people making more than $200,000 a year).

Yes, folks, to get health care, you have to pay for it. And if you want to save a lot of money, I suppose that one way to do it is to gradually stop offering public health care to the elderly. But by highlighting the proposed budget savings and tax increases rather than what these numbers mean for the ability of actual people get the medical care they need, the media is doing us all a disservice.

Comments

I have a RW friend who recently qualified for SS and will soon for Medicare. This is someone who has made his income both legally and illegally, has made every attempt to pay as little in tax as he can, whether legally or not, and hasn't even filed income taxes for years on end.

He despises people who get free money from the government in the form of unemployment or welfare or food stamps, and thinks the increase in the minimum wage is a crime. He gets his news from Limbaugh, Coulter, Newsmax, and "right there, all I need"--the television.

But boy, he'll suck as much money as he can out of it when his turn comes.

The Medicare Plan B Premium means test was already adopted in 2003 when Congress passed the Plan D drug prescription plan as a way of offsetting Plan D costs to the government. So, this part is not new in Bush's budget for 2008. By the way the means test for 2007 is $80,000 for singles' income and $160,000 for family income. The president's budget proposal seeks to eliminate indexing of the medicare premium means test income. Fortunately, there now is a democratic majority in Congress, so the proposal is not a given to be approved. Or is it?

I think the means test is a bad idea 1) because it breaks a promise to working Americans of all income levels, 2) higher wage earners already pay more during their working years, and 3) once the means test is generally accepted, it is very easy to continue to levy higher premiums on increasing number of Americans. Removing indexing, of course over time will have the same effect.

A final note: The idea of eliminating social security and medicare is one of the dearest believes of conservative Americans. One effective way of doing so is to attack other contries under the pretense of WMDs, destroy the economy as well as infrastructure, then load $12 billion on several C-133, give the cash to the leaders of the democratized countries without oversight. Well, this money came from excess social security and medicare premium contributions. Soon, this money will be needed, however, it's not available. When this happens (soon) if we are lucky enough to have a Republican president (no tax increases) we will say good bye to the entitlement programs. Then we will truly live in a jungle.

Right on all counts, Karl Runge, and thank you for delving a little further into the elements of the Medicare proposal that are new to Bush's budget and those that are not: I also agree that a means-test generally is bad policy for the reasons you list as well as the fact that it undermines Medicare as a *universal* program. Universality is good in its own right and also because once a program is no longer universal it becomes easier to weaken support for it and cut funding.

But failing to index the means test to inflation is a whole different level of bad policy -- that's what rises to the level of gradually killing Medicare. As you say, with a Democratic Congress, the no-indexing plan will hopefully not pass, but that's no excuse for the media not to report on the President's plan, preserving the illusion some may have that he is a friend of Medicare.

Vanna LaRoche, it is indeed hard to get through to people who get most of their information from right-wing news sources and even harder to know how to reason with someone who's gaming the system the way you describe. DMI works to emphasize our common interest in public policy that both makes the existing middle class more secure and make it easier for low-income workers and the unemployed to work their way into the middle class. Nevertheless, it's hard to argue with people who stick to such limited sources of information.