krebscycle

Conservatives are now hardly bothering to disguise their political objective – destroying the middle class. Here’s Politico explaining the consensus of official Washington on Medicare. The thing to notice is that they don’t care about cutting costs –  the benefits are what they want to cut.

They will also tell you Medicare, which is on pace to be insolvent in 12 years, is a much, much bigger mess and threat to long-term economic vitality — and much harder to solve. Yes, the rich need to get smaller benefits, but that is almost meaningless in terms of fixing it. Ultimately, many Americans will have to get less generous benefits that start to kick in at an older age — and those changes need to start a decade from now. Otherwise, the math simply doesn’t work.

Medicare costs are inflated to benefit the insiders. For example, the government is forbidden from negotiating discounts on medicines from drug companies – the kind of discounts that big private insurers routinely negotiate. We have to pay list price because Congress, by law, won’t allow Medicare to cut into fat drug company profit margins. Don Berwick, the former Obama administration medicare administrator estimated that 20%-30% of Medicare expenses are wasted or stolen. If your concern was to limit government expenses, surely you’d start by reducing costs before you even began to think about reducing benefits. But the conservatives don’t care about costs, they care about making working Americans poorer, less secure, more desperate to take whatever they are given. By the way, Don Berwick: forced out of office because the GOP Senate refused to let his nomination even come up for a vote. The GOP and their conservative backers don’t want to cut government waste – much of it goes directly to their well-connected backers. They want to cut benefits that make the people more secure.

The policy objectives of the “conservatives” are to  destroy the economic independence of the middle class. The reason: as Thomas Jefferson pointed out, people who are not dependent, insecure, and living meal to meal tend to want to control their own government and to demand better working and living conditions. Beggars can’t be choosers, and conservatives want beggars, grateful to those rich men for whatever jobs and crumbs they can get, not independent citizens.