The neverending Republican war on Medicare

In the week since Mitt Romney named Paul Ryan as his running mate, both Democrats and Republicans have claimed theirs is the party which will save and protect Medicare, the federal health insurance program for nearly 50 million seniors. But Americans have good reason to believe one side is lying to them. After all, the Affordable Care Act signed into law by President Obama adds 8 years to the Medicare trust fund, realizing $716 billion in savings over 10 years from private insurers, hospitals and waste while expanding today's benefits to include free preventive care and closing the prescription "donut" hole. In stark contrast, in 2011 and 2012 98 percent of Republicans in Congress voted for Paul Ryan's budget plan, which not only repeals the ACA but would transform Medicare into an under-funded voucher scheme the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office confirmed would dramatically shift health care costs onto future elderly. Just as damning, the Ryan plan takes the same $716 billion in savings to partially offset the cost of its budget-busting tax cut windfall for the wealthy.

Of course, there's nothing new in this latest GOP effort to roll back the popular and successful old-age insurance program. The same Republican Party that tried to kill Medicare in the 1960s and gut it in the 1990s now wants to smother it again. The only question now for Mitt Romney and his number two Paul Ryan is how fast.

Republican demagoguery of Medicare began well before President Johnson signed it into law in 1965. "I was there, fighting the fight, voting against Medicare," Bob Dole later boasted, "Because we knew it wouldn't work in 1965." In 1964, George H.W. Bush was among the first to call it "socialized medicine." And three years earlier, Ronald Reagan voiced his opposition:

"One of these days, you and I, are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America, when men were free."

But they were wrong. Medicare did work and Americans in their sunset years were more free, not less. Before Medicare, half of seniors had no health insurance at all, a crisis which has been virtually eliminated. And the poverty rate for Americans 65 and older was cut in half in under 10 years. Far and away the poorest age group in 1959, the elderly saw their poverty rates plummet from 35 to 9 percent by 2010 (see chart below the fold).  It's no wonder a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that Medicare was the single most important health care issue for voters, with 73 percent rating it "extremely" or "very" important.

Of course, for Republicans yesterday defeats are tomorrow's battles. Their long war on Medicare was no different.

Throughout the 1990s, Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell and their Republican colleagues renewed the GOP assault. (In 2010, McConnell would falsely charge that Democrats were "sticking it to seniors with cuts to Medicare.") Hoping to slowly but surely undermine the program by shifting its beneficiaries to managed care and private insurance, in 1995 McConnell was among the Republican revolutionaries backing Gingrich's call to slash Medicare spending by $270 billion (or 14 percent) over seven years. As Gingrich put it then:

"We don't want to get rid of it in round one because we don't think it's politically smart," he said. "But we believe that it's going to wither on the vine because we think [seniors] are going to leave it voluntarily."

When President Clinton and his Democratic allies in Congress rushed to defend Medicare from the Republican onslaught, Gingrich launched a blistering assault:

"Think about a party whose last stand is to frighten 85-year-olds, and you'll understand how totally morally bankrupt the modern Democratic Party is."

But as the debate over health care reform heated up in 2009 and 2010, the leading lights of the Republican Party out their brand of political morality on display. Within a span of a few days, Michele Bachmann (R-MN) echoed Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) insisted "what we have to do is wean everybody" off Medicare and Social Security. (Blackburn is now one the leaders of the committee drafting the 2012 Republican platform.) In 2009, Missouri's Roy Blunt argued that "government should have never gotten into the health care business." That same month, Georgia Rep. Tom Price, a one-time orthopedic surgeon and then chairman of the Republican Study Group, proclaimed:

"Going down the path of more government will only compound the problem. While the stated goal remains noble, as a physician, I can attest that nothing has had a greater negative effect on the delivery of health care than the federal government's intrusion into medicine through Medicare."

When asked at a 2009 rally, Rep. Price refused to defend Medicare after stating "we will not rest until we make certain that government-run health care is ended."

All the while, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan was listening and working hard to make it happen.

(Continue reading below the fold.)