Michael Steele had an op-ed today in WaPo.
Republicans want reform that should, first, do no harm, especially to our seniors. That is why Republicans support a Seniors’ Health Care Bill of Rights, which we are introducing today, to ensure that our greatest generation will receive access to quality health care. We also believe that any health-care reform should be fully paid for, but not funded on the backs of our nation’s senior citizens.
The Republican Party’s contract with seniors includes tenets that Americans, regardless of political party, should support. First, we need to protect Medicare and not cut it in the name of “health-insurance reform.” As the president frequently, and correctly, points out, Medicare will go deep into the red in less than a decade. But he and congressional Democrats are planning to raid, not aid, Medicare by cutting $500 billion from the program to fund his health-care experiment. The president also plans to cut hospital payments and Medicare Advantage, all of which will mean fewer treatment options for seniors. These types of “reforms” don’t make sense for the future of an already troubled federal program or for the services it provides that millions of Americans count on.
Robert Costa at NRO:
Of course, it makes political sense for Steele to appeal to seniors disgruntled with the Democrats and their Obamacare proposals. Plus, the polls back up the RNC’s strategy: A Kaiser Family Foundation survey last week showed that 34 percent of people 65 and older — the beneficiaries of Medicare — think they would be worse off if Congress passed health-care reform, while 23 percent said they would be better off, and 34 percent said it would not make a difference.
Even so, such blatant finger-in-the-wind leadership from the RNC is disappointing. Without the ominous cloud of Obamacare, Steele’s rhetoric would sound awfully like British Conservative party leader David Cameron defending the NHS at all costs — just to win a few votes away from the Labour government. It would also be easier for party faithful to swallow Steele’s shift if he were a true believer on protecting Medicare benefits. He’s not.
Jim Geraghty at NRO:
The classic Bill of Rights has ten provisions; the RNC version for seniors only requires six.
Ramesh Ponnuru at NRO:
Its six points seem to have been carefully written so as not to preclude any future Republican effort to cut Medicare. “Medicare should not be raided to pay for another entitlement.” But it can be raided to pay for a tax cut!
Chris Edwards at Cato:
Fiscal conservatives, who have come out in droves to tea party protests and health care meetings this year, are angry at both parties for the government’s massive spending and debt binge in recent years. Mr. Steele has now informed these folks loud and clear that the Republican Party is not interested in restraining government; it is not interested in cutting the program that creates the single biggest threat to taxpayers in coming years. For apparently crass political reasons, Steele defends “our seniors,” but at the expense of massive tax hikes on “our children” if entitlement programs are not cut.
Peter Suderman at Reason:
That’s not a recipe for bringing spiraling costs under control; it’s a clueless, politically motivated attempt to appease seniors by defending Medicare’s awful status quo. Granted, that’s not too surprising coming from the same guy who recently shrugged off responsibility for actually understanding health-care reform—”I don’t do policy” was his exact phrase—and said that the best way to reform health-care was to let the big industry players write the bill.
None of this is to say that reform critics shouldn’t point out the ways in which health care reform proposals might change Medicare for the worse. But doing so doesn’t require one to simultaneously defend a bloated, badly designed entitlement.
Matt Corley at Think Progress:
But Steele hasn’t always believed that Medicare should be sacrosanct when it comes to finding cost-savings. Appearing on NBC’s Meet The Press as a Senate candidate in 2006, Steele said that cuts to Medicare “absolutely” had to be “on the table” in order to “control runaway federal spending”:
MR. RUSSERT: Your Web site, Mr. Steele, says you want to control runaway federal spending.
LT. GOV. STEELE: Mm-hmm.
MR. RUSSERT: What programs would you cut?
LT. GOV. STEELE: Well, what I would like to do is something that we did in Maryland. We — Governor Ehrlich and I came into office, we had a $2.2 billion deficit staring us in the face and a bloated government to contend with. And so we stepped back and evaluated exactly what the priorities of our government should be. Seventy-eight percent of our spending is in two areas: education and health care.
MR. RUSSERT: It’s the same in the federal government.
LT. GOV. STEELE: It’s the same. And my point…
MR. RUSSERT: Seventy percent is Social Security, Medicare and Defense.
LT. GOV. STEELE: Absolutely. Absolutely.
MR. RUSSERT: Would you touch those?
LT. GOV. STEELE: Abso — Tim, everything has…
MR. RUSSERT: Everything’s on the table.
LT. GOV. STEELE: Everything has to be on the table, my friend. We are living in a time — we have to — government has to act like the rest of, the rest of the world and sit back and look at your budget. If you don’t have enough money in any given month, what do you do? You’ve got to reprioritize. You’ve got to take care of the business at hand.
Additionally, the RNC as an institution has aggressively supported Medicare cuts in the past. In 1995, when congressional Republicans sought to cut $270 billion from Medicare over seven years, the RNC ran radio ads supporting the cuts.
Finally, the implication of Steele and the RNC’s Medicare rhetoric is that proposed health care reforms would cut benefits for seniors, but as FactCheck.org recently noted, that claim is “outright false, though that doesn’t keep it from being repeated ad infinitum.” The AARP, one of the largest membership organizations representing seniors in America, agrees.
Think Progress does what Fred Hiatt and the Washington Post can’t do, which is to point out that for the past two decades Republicans have repeatedly attempted to axe Medicare spending, and those plucky bloggers apparently even spent five minutes with a high-tech tool (not Tom Friedman) called “Teh GOOGLE,” and dig up recent interviews in which Steele actively and openly called for cuts to medicare. Because bloggers don’t fact check.
Joe Klein at Swampland:
What makes Steele’s column especially hilarious is that it’s about health care for senior citizens–actually, it’s an attempt to scare senior citizens–but it never mentions that Medicare is “a government-run health-care system.” One would think that the Washington Post’s intrepid editors would have force Steele to cut or modify Steele’s lie about Obama’s “government-run” plan, and one would hope that the Post’s editors would ask Steele to point out the Medicare–the program he wants to “save”–is precisely such a plan.
One last point: A strong argument can be made that Obama isn’t being honest about all this, either. Medicare is going to require some drastic reform if isn’t going to (a) go broke or (b) break the bank. The most plausible reform would be to abandon the current fee-for-service system and put doctors on salaries, as the excellent Mayo Clinic does. But doctors oppose that. So no go….Meanwhile, paging an ombudsman!
Dick Morris has been nudging the GOP towards a “scare the seniors” strategy for the past six weeks and now here it is. The political benefits are obvious and there’s a gratifying touch of poetic justice in using the entitlement mindset of a high-turnout demographic to try to derail the mother of all entitlement programs. But even so, the more lip service Republicans pay to Medicare now, the less room they have to maneuver later when Medicare’s rapidly approaching day of reckoning finally arrives. Has Steele conceded too much in trying to derail the Hopenchange express? I’m leaning towards no just because the GOP’s fingerprints are already on the program and once it runs dry the crisis will be severe enough that even Democrats will be forced to support drastic measures, leaving them in a poor position to screech about Republicans selling out grandma. Don’t kid yourselves, though: If the GOP chooses to die on this hill, then ten years from now the left will have greater leverage in demanding cuts to other federal programs (like, say, defense) to free up cash for the Medicare boondoggle conservatives now profess to love so much. Choices, choices.
Actually, I think the fact that the head of the RNC’s been reduced to taking this position at all proves the necessity of stopping ObamaCare now, even if it means a Faustian bargain. Such is the British dependency on universal health care that even Tory leader David Cameron is forced to regularly reassure Britons that conservatives “support the NHS 100%.” We’ll be hearing the same thing — or worse — from Republican presidential candidates about ObamaCare within a decade if America chokes down this crap sandwich. Do what you have to do to hold the line.
Still, what we’re seeing here is the GOP swearing that they will protect, defend and preserve a single-payer health-care system. And this comes after months spent fighting a “government takeover” of health care. If you could hook that kind of cognitive dissonance up to a turbine, we wouldn’t need cap-and-trade. But there’s nothing exceptional about this move: Britain’s conservative party supports the socialized National Health Service. Canada’s conservative party supports the country’s single-payer system. And America’s conservative party supports Medicare. The thing about government-run health care is that it’s really, really popular, and it’s really, really popular because people like it.
So congratulations to Fred Hiatt for landing such a buzzworthy piece of nonsense for his publication and I hope the right-wing enjoys the giant tax hikes we’ll be enacting down the road once they show the political world that any attempt to trim Medicare spending, no matter how modest, will be savaged by opportunists on the other side.
