Why Reform Is So Hard (cont.)

TW: Micheal Steele's health care speech yesterday epitomizes why reform is so challenging. He combined blind support for the current Medicare program with untrue insinuations about the Dems' program. It is a potent prescription.

Dems can bash the hypocrisy of the Republicans coming out so strongly for the single-payer, cost expanding, voter coddling Medicare program. But why would they not support a program favored by 50MM aggressive voters. Power retention is not about what is right, it is about what gets votes.

In the mean time, Steele's program left universal care and how health care costs could actually be controlled essentially unmentioned. In other words, the opposition gains if nothing happens (as we have blogged repeatedly) so that the incumbent will be accused of amongst other things: indecisive, weak leadership; scattered focus; extremism, incompetence, yada, yada, yada.

From Ezra Klein at WaPo:
"There's no real secret behind Michael Steele's sudden adoration of Medicare: Seniors are the age group most solidly opposed to health-care reform, they vote in particularly large numbers in midterm elections, and they are uniquely active on the local level.

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...."

From Micheal Shearer at Time summarizes Steele's program:
1. No cuts in Medicare, a government-run program Republicans like, which Steele admits is going "into the red in less than a decade." (Does this mean that Republicans now support tax increases to pay for the shortfalls? Or that there is no solution? Or that something else should be cut? What?)
2. No expansion of government-run healthcare, which could involve "boards that would decide what treatments would or wouldn't be funded." (Left unmentioned is the fact that such boards already exist in the private health care marketplace, and, in practice, in the Medicare system, which, in the words of its own website, "does not cover everything, and it does not pay the total cost for most services or supplies that are covered.")
3. No efforts to ration care based on age. (Left unmentioned is the fact that no one in the Democratic Party has proposed this...)
4. No government interference with end of life care. (TW: thx goodness Steele would protect us from death panels, dont get me started...)
5. Not cut the Medicare Advantage Plan. (Left unmentioned is the fact that Medicare Advantage provides a subsidy of about $17 billion a year to private insurance companies to offer services that would otherwise be offered by Medicare...)"
http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/08/24/the-republican-partys-no-line-on-health-care/