Jon Cohn writes today about the successful Republican attempt to create enormous opposition to healthcare reform among senior citizens. How? By demagoguing the $500 billion in Medicare cuts contained in ACA, of course. Then he says this:
But even to the extent that seniors hold different views, it’s surprising they believe Republicans will keep Medicare sacrosanct. After all, this is the party that opposes government-run insurance (which Medicare is) and has tried repeatedly
to privatize the program. Young Guns, the new book by three House Republican leaders, calls for turning Medicare into a voucher program that would dramatically reduce the program’s guaranteed benefits — an idea that, as [Marilyn Werber] Serafini points out in a separate story, seniors strongly oppose.
I’d guess that two things are going on here. First, seniors just tend to be more conservative than other age groups and also a lot more resistant to change. So a lot of what we’re seeing is Republicans pushing on an open door. Second, seniors aren’t reading Young Guns. They’re watching Fox News and reading stuff on tea party email lists, something that would turn anyone’s brain to mush. What’s worse, there’s not even any pushback from Democrats to any of this. After all, what can they say? Yes, we cut Medicare spending, but it won’t have any actual effect? Good luck with that. They’re stuck.
This is one of the reasons why I think moderate conservatives give Democrats way too little credit for their relatively honest funding of ACA. Were there some optimistic assumptions there? Sure. Are some of the cost control measures not going to work as well as they hope? Sure. To about the 80% level, though, Democrats really did insist that ACA be fully funded. By ordinary political standards that’s pretty impressive, and by recent Republican standards it’s just a plain miracle. And it was a pretty costly piece of fiscal honesty too. A big part of how ACA was funded comes from that $500 billion Medicare cut, and that’s just a flat out electoral disaster. It may have been necessary, but there’s no question that Democrats are going to pay for it at the polls. They really deserve a little more credit for that.
