Medicare at 50: Successful, Popular, and Threatened By Conservatives

[eridani]

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/07/31/medicare-50-successful-popular-and-threatened-conservatives

Republican rhetoric against Medicare has soften slightly in 50 years, but they’ve never stopped trying to do away with the program. Today, destroying Medicare (and Medicaid, and Social Security) is a big part of the GOP’s war against the poor, the elderly, the disabled, and economically disadvantaged.

--Today, Republican presidential candidate and former Florida governor Jeb Bush says he wants to “phase out” Medicare, and replace it with a system from which people get government funds to help them purchase private health insurance.
--In 2012, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney adopted running mate Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) plan to privatize Medicare by converting it to a “premium support” program. In other words, vouchers.
-- House Republicans have repeatedly approved budgets that would end Medicare as we know it, by slashing its funding, and replacing it with a voucher system for purchasing private insurance, while passing the costs on to seniors.
--Since they haven’t been able to kill the program outright, Republicans have tried to starve Medicare of funds.

It’s precisely because Medicare is both successful and popular that Republicans want nothing more than to “drown it in the bathtub” for its 50th birthday. Conservatives feared the passage of programs like Social Security and Medicare for the same reasons they feared the passage of health care reform. They knew that if these programs were successful, they’d become so popular that Americans would never voluntarily give them up.

Not only did conservatives worst fears regarding Medicare and other programs come true, but Medicare’s success may yet serve as a model for further health care reform. A December 2014 New York Times/CBS survey showed that 59 percent of Americans support the government offering a healthcare plan similar to Medicare to compete with the private market. Calls for “Medicare for all!” may resound as loudly as they did during the the health care reform debate.