The Health of the Elderly Precludes Parties and Will Decide the Election

Apparently there’s nothing special about the 26th electoral district in the state of New York.

A traditional conservative stronghold, the region encompassing the rural areas of the Buffalo and Rochester suburbs has been voting for Republican candidates for four decades — since the first Nixon administration. McCain beat Obama handily there in 2008.

But the one who was celebrating the victory in the special election for the representative to Congress in this forgotten piece of the most populous state in the Northeast was Democrat Kathy Hochul. She captured 47 percent of the vote — against the 43 percent of the Republican favorite, state Rep. Jane L. Cowin — emphasizing that the new plan by the opposition to amend the Medicare program, which is aimed at people over 65 years, would be a criminal attack on the elderly population.

Cuts in Medicare are part of the campaign by the majority leader in the House of Representatives, Rep. Paul Ryan*, to reduce the public deficit and were vetoed on Wednesday in the Senate, which has a Democratic majority.

But more than the predictable victory in the upper house of Congress, Democrats celebrated this week what they already consider to be a populist tactic to be used in the next general elections in 2012: To present Republicans as the party defending the payment of the allowance taxes for the wealthiest while attacking the benefits of middle class elderly.

The question is whether the discourse of fear is stronger than the increasingly arid day-to-day of an economy still marked by unemployment and turtle-paced growth.

“Republicans kick and scream about unfair ‘demagoguery’ — the very same Republicans who spent their 2010 campaign attacking the Affordable Care Act for its cuts to Medicare. It would be funny if it wasn’t so pathetic,” wrote Andrew Leonard, a staff writer at Salon.

Last year, after a strong attack from the right, the Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives to the Republicans.

Medicare was created in 1965 during the Lyndon Johnson administration, when only half of Americans in the elderly had some type of health care. Nowadays, this is the only sector of civil society in the world’s largest economy to rely on universal public service of health care.

In addition to citizens over 65 years of age, Medicare also benefits younger people with physical disabilities and chronic illnesses. The government estimates that in 2018 nearly 60 million Americans will use Medicare. And experts ensure that the average cost of service per person will rise in these seven years, from the current $11,000 to $17,000.

A huge account, but as the Democrats remembered, “taking the right of old people and sick” is a powerful message, as revealed in the campaign for the position of deputy in western New York state.

Not coincidentally, Hochul’s parents, who are retired, made hundreds of phone calls to families in the region, sharing with voters the concerns of a reality without Medicare.

The Ryan plan foresees, in practice, the end of complete coverage and offers vouchers to users of Medicare, who would pay health care companies for any medical services, keeping some government subsidy.

The issue has become central in the debate on the U.S. public deficit, due to growth of elderly people in the country. With the involvement in the regional contest of national politicians, such as Vice President Joe Biden and former President Bill Clinton, the rural area of extreme western New York state — similar in its physical and human structure to the portion of United States with the greatest resistance to Barack Obama’s propaganda — has become the surprising lung of a possible Democratic recovery.

With no major opponents in the presidential election — the strongest names submitted by the Republicans so far, the former governor Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman and Tim Pawlenty, do not seem to galvanize the electorate of right, and the most popular option, former governor Sarah Palin, can be seen as a sectarian figure — Obama begins to see light at the end of the tunnel in the possibility of regaining control of Congress.

But Leonard slams on the brakes and remembers that before thinking about regaining control of the House of Representatives, Democrats need to retake the reins of the economy.

“If the economy is slumping when the 2012 campaign heats up, Medicare and the deficit will not be the deciding issues in how anyone votes. Ryan’s budget will be long forgotten. And Obama will be a one-termer,” he bets.

*Editor’s Note: Paul Ryan is the chairman of the House Budget Committee, not the majority leader.