The sociopath who ran “The Note” post-Halperin sheds his nonpartisan persona to shill for the eradication of Medicare:
They’re up with a Web ad targeting GOP House members by warning of the consequences of Republicans’ “voting to end Medicare” — an ad the independent fact-check group PolitiFact.com labeled “pants on fire.”
[….]Democrats during the Clinton years said Republicans wanted the program to “wither on the vine.” Last year, it was Republican-aligned groups attacking Democrats for a provision in the Obama health care law that would find $500 billion in future savings in Medicare.
The result has long been political paralysis around Medicare, with neither side seeing much of an incentive in seriously engaging in a discussion that’s presumed to be a political loser. It comes as Medicare’s costs are expected to spike significantly, as Baby Boomers reach age 65 and health care costs continue to escalate.
There is no mention here of the larger truth, that rising medical costs are also hugely problematic — more problematic — in the absence of Medicare, just the Village-approved right-wing meme that we have to tighten our belts by throwing sick people out into the street. It’s the only responsible thing to do! I didn’t want to do it, I felt I owed it to them.
Also too, lying about “death panels” is exactly the same as factually accurate statements about Medicare funding.
Served
Gutting Medicare to save the budget is like a group of pioneers going full-cannibal when they still have a wagon full of food.
wonkie
YOu are right to use the term “sociopath”. It is well past time to get rid of the polite fiction that Republicans and people who vote for them are just people with good intentions and different ideas. Their intentions are not good. Their one idea is selfishness.
Villago Delenda Est
The fact is, our health care system is a mess because of the profit motive…and skyrocketing Medicare costs are directly tied to such sociopath assholes as Bill Frist’s entire fucking family.
WereBear
@wonkie: Yes; what happened? I remember when “sociopath” was a bad thing.
Zifnab
Both sides do it! Both sides do it!
I do disagree with this. Medicare has done a great deal to fuel the medical industry. Drug companies can produce new medications – particularly for the elderly – knowing full well that they’ll be able to collect on their product indefinitely from the Medicare trust. Orthopedics wouldn’t exist as it does today if Medicare wasn’t footing the bill for the thousands of hip replacements and spinal adjustments it covers annually.
Functionally, Medicare is an unlimited resource. The medical community is simply tapping this resource. If we got rid of Medicare, we’d take a large chunk of the medical community with it. Who needs the doctors and nurses and technicians necessary to operate an empty hospital? Who wants to be in the medical field if they have to take big pay cuts dictated by private insurers and teaming hordes of the impoverished elderly?
Without Medicare and Medicaid, the industry would collapse. I suspect a surplus of infrastructure and a drought of funding would drive prices down. Of course, the price dive would take quality of service along with it. But at least we’d be saving money.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
It still just utterly fucking amazes me how quickly the most counterintuitive policies for a problem or issue are the ones that end up treated as the ONLY serious solution. And somehow, the policies’ failures only make it that much more imperative to further them at the cost of everything fucking else.
Am I going to find that once I’m in middle age, I’ll be facing a future without Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, or anything else, not because they went broke, but because they were ‘phased out’ by our brilliant Galtian Overlords to stave off going broke…and then stripped to mere crumbs because they, the deficit wasn’t going to solve itself you know. Fucking assholes, all of them. And if the patterns keep holding like they do, they’ll fucking win and ruin us all. Because that’s the only way to save the country you know, all the Serious People know that.
Comrade DougJ
@Zifnab:
I am not convinced that what you describe would lower the price of private insurance.
evinfuilt
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik: They love the feeling of self satisfaction they get from saying something that makes no sense. They believe people who can’t figure out how their plan works (it doesn’t) look at them as super geniuses for knowing how it will really work.
It’s a lot like the same mentality that forms the love of conspiracy theories. Only THEY know the truth.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
Oh, and Something OT to improve my mood even more this morning:
Rising gas prices are likely to send Exxon’s profits up by 50%, and other oil companies by 33%.
A nice reminder of how utterly artificial the oil prices are, and how utterly fucking obscenely fucked over we’re getting by the energy companies. You know, the same ones who get the GOP to run interference for them on subsidies so they can make out like Billion Dollar Bandits.
jwest
Until liberals acknowledge and embrace the use of Death Panels, no progress will be made on improving healthcare.
Why do you continually run away from reality?
Comrade Javamanphil
@Zifnab: We beat on reporters for their “both sides do it” idiocy quite a bit and label it lazy journalism. I think this frame may actually be missing the larger point that these people use the “both sides do it” meme to feel as if they are the only smart/ethical people in the room. It’s moral superiority through storytelling rather than through actually doing anything. So it’s laziness but in the service of egoism. Bring back the muckrakers.
4tehlulz
I think the bigger story is that someone still takes The Note seriously.
Zifnab
@Comrade DougJ:
Oh, insurance? No, no. I meant the actual cost of care. Insurance prices, I’m sure, would continue to rise until they hit that sweet spot of “Maximum profits”.
But squeezing profits at the insurance level would kill a lot of the expensive technological improvements at the treatment level. So you’d have more X-rays and fewer MRIs. More aspirin and less designer drugs. That kind of thing would bring down the price of actual care.
Uloborus
@evinfuilt: and @Comrade Javamanphil:
Yeah, this is the drum Benen beats with his ‘Cult Of Savvy’ thing, and the more I apply it, the more it makes sense to me. It is absolutely antithetical to them to acknowledge that Medicare saves people or makes life better. That would be suggesting policies have real world value. Smart people know that what’s important is when a daring thinker like Paul Ryan manages to make a main political platform out of ideas that are fantastically stupid policy.
They’re cheap contrarians, looking for the easiest way to feel like the real adults in the room. Throw in a little corruption and a culture of schmoozing with the elite, and they’re helpless suckers for every new Republican lie.
piratedan
well I guess it’s time to reinstitute the draft, for anyone 55 and over, we’ll have to select certain birthdays and depending upon the budget, those people will simply have to do without healthcare
patroclus
The Note’s prescient explication of the salient fact that both parties have identical positions on Medicare is bracing and moves the debate about destroying Medicare onto more earnest ground.
loretta
As I’ve noted before in other comment sections, this privatizing Medicare for under 55s is a complete non-starter. Not a single insurance company is lobbying for it. It’s all bluff. That “serious” reporters and bloggers don’t get that is just more distraction.
Until we talk about revenue enhancement – jobs, job creation, infrastructure projects, jobs, raising taxes, Wall Street sales tax on derivatives, jobs, Wall Street bonus tax at 90%, taxes on banks that charge outrageous credit card rates, etc., the rest is just Bullshit.
Mark S.
The problems of Medicare and rising health care costs are kind of important, but Chunky Bobo is asking the really serious questions:
I used to think Douthat was just an idiot, but this column illustrates what an intellectual and moral midget he is.
loretta
Along the lines of “revenue enhancement”, when the weasels in Washington talk about comparing the family budget to the gov’t budget (totally stupid, but that’s how they dumb it down), they always say, “We, like families, have to cut back to live within our means.” They fail to point out that many families get a second, third, even fourth job to make ends meet. They can only cut so much, or choose to only cut so much. Then they find more revenue, more income streams.
God forbid they talk about creating more revenue.
PeakVT
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik: Americans have asked repeatedly to be fucked over by the oil companies. The oil companies are merely providing the service people have asked for.
kt
Never addressed by these mental midgets is why health care costs continue to rise. It’s always this passive voice crap like “costs will rise” with no effort whatsoever spent explaining why an important drug that contains $1 worth of raw materials costs the consumer $20, $40, $60 per dose. The electricity per MRI might cost $3 per scan but we pay up to $2400. Obviously R&D and the cost of am MRI machine must be factored in, but these “rising costs” are the result of overcharging in every step of the process.
Stillwater
@Zifnab: Medicare has done a great deal to fuel the medical industry.
Fair enough. But only to the extent that every government program is rife with support for pet-projects and favored sectors. But to use that trivial fact as an argument – as conservatives are doing – that the private sector could provide those services more cheaply willfully ignores the purpose of Medicare to begin with.
Now, if a conservative – or anyone, ftm – put forward the argument to end Medicare as a separate institution by putting seniors in the same broad pool as covered by the ACA mandate to better control escalating costs and share that burden more broadly, I would find it minimally plausible and at least worth having a discussion about. But this isn’t the argument, and it’s a heavy burden to meet. Especially since the advocates of voucherizing Medicare are also intent on repealing the ACA.
liberal
@Zifnab:
It probably would, but I doubt it would bring down costs in an “efficient” way. Here, by “efficient,” I mean “given a budget constraint, an allocation of resources which optimizes long-term care outcomes.”
I do like that you mentioned “spinal adjustments,” by which I assume you mean “spinal fusion surgery.” AFAICT, from a casual reading of the intertubes, that procedure is about $30B down the toilette annually.
piratedan
LOL
http://verydemotivational.memebase.com/2011/04/24/demotivational-posters-about-time/
zach
Someone needs to put together a comprehensive list of congressional votes on bills that would’ve added cost controls to Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA. A long list with five columns: the year, the name of the bill, the fraction of Republicans and Democrats voting for the bill, and the estimated savings per capita.
I can think of a couple off hand, but this would be a great way to quickly counter all the “where’s the Dems plan??” nonsense.
Robert Waldmann
Pants on Fire alert. The political paralysis on Medicare includes the PPACA with hundreds of billions cut over ten years. OK so any cuts even to the Medicare Advantage boondoggle require 60 Senators of one party, but the claim of paralysis is a pants on fire lie.
The assertion that replacing Medicare with a voucher program called “medicare” is eliminating Medicare in contrast is simply true. I guess he would be satisfied by “ending Medicare as we know it,” so in a good faith effort to compromise I will say his claim about paralysis contradicts the truth as we know it.
rikryah
them lying is what they do.
kay
It’s factually inaccurate.
Republicans privatized 1/5 of Medicare in 2002. Far from “paralysis” we had an aggressive conservative agenda enacted re: Medicare.
Medicare Advantage is a huge failure, as far as costs, so I see why he might want to pretend it didn’t happen, but it did.
Why doesn’t anyone ask Ryan about the last conservative privatization plan? The one that added 15% to Medicare costs.
DavidNC
also too, “wither on the vine” wasn’t a dem frame, it was a direct Newt quote.
Charles
A gold star to DavidNC for having a historical memory, and an empty Christmas stocking to Doug for lacking same. So much Republican lying went on trying to deny that Newt had said Medicare would wither on the vine that they could have turned the House into a mattress factory.
Jamie
Strange, you call someone a Marxist Islamofascist, and he doesn’t invite you to dinner. simply mysterious.
Ruckus
@loretta:
Just because it’s bullshit doesn’t mean it won’t be discussed, praised and endlessly spread around. Actually that may be why it gets endlessly spread around.