Medicare or “Mediscare”: When America Euthanizes the Elderly

For several weeks, Democrats have been increasing their attacks against the Republicans’ proposed reforms for health insurance for the elderly. Many Americans now fear losing their coverage.

Battered by continual economic difficulties and in bad shape in the polls, Democrats believe they’ve found the Achilles’ heel of their Republican opponents: their plan to reform Medicare, heath insurance for the elderly. Because, even if public opinion does not in principle oppose reducing public spending, it overwhelmingly rejects drastic changes to Medicare. The Democrats understand this, and for several weeks they have been concentrating their attacks on this issue, fueling Americans’ fears that they will witness the disappearance of one the few benefits they receive. The media has renamed this tactic “Mediscare,” and it annoys Republicans just as much as it worries them. According to a recent CNN poll, 58 percent of Americans are opposed to Republican proposals. Even more concerning: 54 percent of the conservatives who make up the traditional Republican electorate are opposed.

Received at the White House last week, Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the Budget Committee in the House of Representatives and leader of the project, did not hesitate to call out Barack Obama. “Stop grandstanding,” he told him. This heated exchange between the two parties took an even more dramatic turn after the Republicans’ surprise defeat two weeks ago during the election for the representative of the 26th district of the State of New York. For political observers and the polls, the outcome was clear: Republican candidate Jane Corwin was heading for an easy victory in a district historically favorable to her party. But then, on the evening of Tuesday, May 24, it was her Democratic adversary, Kathy Hochul, who triumphed. How? “By distorting the reality of the debate in order to frighten the elderly,” according to Paul Ryan.* In other words, by implementing the now famous “Mediscare” tactic.

In the context of a financial crisis — the U.S. national debt already stands at $14.3 billion — the GOP is calling for radical changes to health insurance for the elderly, which amount to a de facto progression toward privatization. The system put in place in 1965 is expensive for the government: Too expensive, they say. And these costs will have to increase with the anticipated aging of the population: $400 billion dollars last year, with costs possibly exceeding $500 billion five years from now. Today, 48 million people are receiving benefits. There will be 73 million in 2025. “Everyone knows that we can’t continue down this road,” Paul Ryan said in April, after having made his reform ideas public in the context of a broad plan to cut nearly $6 trillion dollars of public spending over the course of the next 10 years.*

In particular, the Republican plan would raise the age of eligibility to 67 by 2033. As of 2022, Americans over the age of 65 would not benefit from practically full coverage of their medical expenses, but simply from grants that would enable them to buy private insurance, an average of $8,000 per year, according to the estimates of the Congressional Budget Office, the bipartisan congressional organization specializing in budget issues. In other words, not much in a country where insurance costs are exorbitant. “The majority of elderly people would have to spend more money for health care than in the current system,” the CBO predicts, a forecast that fuels the Democrats gleeful arguments.*

This proposed reform was symbolically adopted by the House of Representatives, which is controlled by the Republicans, before being flatly rejected by the Senate at the hands of their political opponents. While both parties are still negotiating a compromise on budget issues in Washington, the fate of Medicare has crystallized the antagonists. “This proposal would never pass Congress on its own, and it does not belong in a larger deal either,” Democratic Senators said Monday in a letter addressed to Vice-President Joe Biden, charged by Barack Obama with advancing the discussion. To defend their position, they could rely on the diagnosis of Paul Krugman: “Yes, Medicare is sustainable in its current form,” the winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in economics wrote in The New York Times, before adding, “The solution to the future of Medicare is Medicare — smarter, less open-ended, but recognizably the same program.”

*Editor’s note: The preceding quotations, although accurately translated, could not be independently verified.