WashPo (2009) - "GOP Would Protect Health Care for Seniors" by Michael Steele - What Happened?

[TomCADem]

This is just a reminder of the enourmous impact the corporate media has in propping up Republicans and turning the public, including the left, against Democrats. Remember how the corporate media pushed lies of "death panels" and cuts in Medicare to turn many in the public, including many on the left, against Health Care Reform? Now, that Republicans are truly attempting to end Medicare, you have that same corporate media, including so-called fact checkers like Politifact, insisting that Ryan's proposal to turn Medicare into a voucher programs does not end Medicare!

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/22/969334/-PolitiFacts-Medicare-fail,-round-two

In the case of Health Care Reform, the media repeated Republicans lies and talking points against Health Care Reform. In the case of the GOP's effort to turn Medicare into Vouchercare, you have the media agressively opposing Democratic efforts to tell the truth about Republican proposals to turn Medicare into a voucher program.

Finally, you have the corporate media suffering from collective amnesia when Republicans uniformly pledged not to cut Medicare, including this essay by the GOP's chairman at the time:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/23/AR2009082302036.html

Republicans want reform that should, first, do no harm, especially to our seniors. That is why Republicans support a Seniors' Health Care Bill of Rights, which we are introducing today, to ensure that our greatest generation will receive access to quality health care. We also believe that any health-care reform should be fully paid for, but not funded on the backs of our nation's senior citizens.

The Republican Party's contract with seniors includes tenets that Americans, regardless of political party, should support. First, we need to protect Medicare and not cut it in the name of "health-insurance reform." As the president frequently, and correctly, points out, Medicare will go deep into the red in less than a decade. But he and congressional Democrats are planning to raid, not aid, Medicare by cutting $500 billion from the program to fund his health-care experiment. The president also plans to cut hospital payments and Medicare Advantage, all of which will mean fewer treatment options for seniors. These types of "reforms" don't make sense for the future of an already troubled federal program or for the services it provides that millions of Americans count on.

Second, we need to prohibit government from getting between seniors and their doctors. The government-run health-care experiment that Obama and the Democrats propose will give seniors less power to control their own medical decisions and create government boards that would decide what treatments would or would not be funded. Republicans oppose any new government entity overruling a doctor's decision about how to treat his or her patient.

Simply put, we believe that health-care reform must be centered on patients, not government.

[Xipe Totec]

1. GOP Will Protect Health Care *FROM* Seniors nt

[jwirr]

2. I think Steele is telling us what they really think - that they are trying

to protect SSA - it is the methods that are wrong. They want to privatize - we do not.

[CBHagman]

3. In that piece Steele claimed that Obama was highly partisan...

...but as Rachel Maddow pointed out, bipartisan groups of lawmakers were negotiating health care for months on end, and the GOP bailed. In the end I think only Joseph Cao of Louisiana voted for the Affordable Care Act. None of the so-called moderates in the Senate supported the legislation, despite provisions Republicans had supported in previous years.