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Do Redstaters Want to Get Rid of Medicare?

By: AndrewHyman (Diary)  |  December 27th, 2009 at 03:13 PM  | 

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A commenter recently informed me that I cannot be a conservative or a Republican unless I support getting rid of Medicare and all other federal regulation of health care.  I’m sure that Medicare can be improved, and I might even support a law saying that an individual state should be able to opt out of both Medicare taxes and Medicare payments if the state thinks it can do a better job.  However, I do NOT favor elimination of Medicare.  Does that mean I can’t be a conservative or a Republican?

Consider what was said on October 28, 1980:

JIMMY CARTER: In the past, the relationship between Social Security and Medicare has been very important to provide some modicum of aid for senior citizens in the retention of health benefits. Governor Reagan, as a matter of fact, began his political career campaigning around this nation against Medicare . . . .

RONALD REAGAN: There you go again [Laughter]. When I opposed Medicare, there was another piece of legislation meeting the same problem before the Congress. I happened to favor the other piece of legislation and thought it would be better for the senior citizens and provide better care than the one that was finally passed. I was not opposing the principle of providing care for them. I was opposing one piece of legislation versus another.

A modest suggestion: if some Redstaters want to get rid of Medicare, keep that goal hush-hush, because it might hinder their credibility as we try to stop the current attempt by congressional Democrats to take over a sixth of the economy.

COMMENTS

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  • mbecker908

    And I’m probably a hell of a lot closer to being ensnared by it than you are.

    And, FWIW, I’m not “rich”.

    • mbecker908

      I’m also opposed to Social Security.

      • AndrewHyman

        I agree that Social Security should be restructured. GW Bush proposed simply requiring people to save money for retirement in a private account, and that seems like a decent approach to the whole thing, if people are allowed to invest the money in safe investments. I’m just speaking in policy terms here, and not commenting on what may or may not be constitutional.

        • mbecker908

          Social Security – and I’m 100% serious about this statement – is the most racist institution every initiated by the US government. For all it’s other faults (any one of which would lead me to nuke the system) it is an income transfer mechanism moving money from lower and middle class minority men to middle and upper class white women.

          SS “accounts” are not owned by the individual, they are simply managed by the government. Thus when a black male works 40+ years and contributes to the system and drops dead within a month or two of retirement his dependents are left nothing in his estate from those years of contribution. OTOH, a white woman who has minimal or no income from taxable work who lives to her late 80′s or 90′s will reap the benefit of the black man’s contribution.

      • IJB

        I don’t think we can get rid of them in one step. In fact, we never be able to get rid of them entirely in the end.

        But the first step to reigning them in, and imposing fiscal sanity is to ‘de-entitlement’ and means-test them.

        That’d be a real great start…

    • http://www.the41stvote.org rcov092

      n/t

      • SteveLA

        rcov092

        Medicare may collapse or even come close to the same, but CongressCritters of all persuasion will rush to the rescue STAT thanks to the votes of Millions of Seasoned Citizens who would storm the capital if Medicare was allowed to fail.

        It’s one of the subtexts of the whole ObamaCare debate’ once an entitlement is written into law, it never goes away and is never reduced. Stopping the birth of ObamaCare is the only way to prevent it from becoming one more monkey on the tax payers back…forever.

  • reddog53

    Before you go much further in oversimplifying this issue, take a step back and ask yourself this:

    Would you rather live in a nation where prosperity enabled everyone to live their lives independently and freely — or in a nation where the state determined the ‘fairness’ of the most basic needs?

    Would it be better for 95% of the people to live as their pursuit of life, liberty and happiness provided and their generosity provided for the 5% who were truly needy — or — for 45% of the people to be so heavily taxed to provide everything for the other 55%?

    In Chile, where social security was privatized in the 1970s, it is now commonplace to have retired individuals drawing pensions that are larger than their wages when they were working!

    I’d rather see that then having people given $1400 a month and told that they should be happy with that!

  • AndrewHyman

    Chile requires a monthly payroll deduction. Are you against that type of system? I’m not necessarily against it.

  • reddog53

    But it is theirs, and they get to keep it–and pass it to their heirs.

    I would welcome such as system — without a ‘public option.’

  • AndrewHyman

    Not only would the money in the account belong to each individual citizen, but it would also be protected by the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. GW Bush maybe could have done a better job of explaining this as a selling point for his plan.

    Still, Social Security is different from Medicare and different from health insurance. I don’t think solutions for Social Security necessarily apply to the others.

  • reddog53

    Get government out of the business and it will be better for all.

  • acat

    (n/t)

  • http://impudent.blognation.us/blog kyle8

    that eventually became both SS and Medicare. Although I should be against it in principle, I realize that in the real world you have to make some “group” consideration for older people for the mere reason that there are many who WILL not save enough for their old age, and some who through life long poverty cannot do so.

    It is all well and good to say that your libertarian or conservative principles are against this sort of socialism, but without some of these basic things you would have such a hew and cry from the media every time some old person died that you would get a groundswell to “do something” and soon you would see even worse forms of socialism.

    HOWEVER, having said that, I am against them as they are currently constituted because they are bankrupt Ponzi schemes.

    If those forced savings had been actually invested, even in low yield bonds, then we would be so much better off

  • mbecker908

    the government sets narrow rules and holds the money.

  • http://impudent.blognation.us/blog kyle8

    funded in other ways. Like I said above, the choice is not between Adam Smith’s Laisses faire and some sort of socialism.

    The choice we have is between a little bit of socialism and a lot of socialism.