Making Medicare worse

I know I have said more than once that white seniors in America vote for the wrong party, and I have warned this is not without price.

And that is true whichever is the cart or the horse, white seniors voting Republican or Democrats withdrawing their protection for earned benefits on which white seniors rely.

I'm guessing the following means anybody not poor enough for Medicaid or other forms of special help for Medicare beneficiaries who are utterly destitute will be getting hammered with hikes to "cost sharing."

Reaching anything approaching $175 billion in spending reductions almost certainly means some kind of structural changes to Medicare benefits. 

That could entail collapsing Medicare Parts A and B or hiking costs for wealthier beneficiaries, both of which are ideas that have been floated by the Obama administration. 

Medicare is already a much shittier deal than in was decades ago, and it gets worse now every year that passes.

Changes continue that over time will make Medicare less and less the universal earned benefit we all paid for all our lives and more and more a means-tested benefit for people so poor they have no cars, no cable or internet, set the thermostat at 55 in the winter, can't run the A/C in the summer, can't buy all their medicines when in the "donut hole," and can't pay for their own cell phones at $10 a month.

And that means more and more elderly will be pushed down into that kind of bitter poverty for the last of their "golden years."

This was an idea floated by O, whose administration screwed the elderly already by cutting funding of advantage plans to fund subsidies to Obamacare.

The "doc fix" deal

This is a change that will hurt mostly white beneficiaries and protect mostly black ones.

That's a disparate voter impact (white seniors mostly voted against him) as well as a disparate racial impact.

Do you suppose anybody will be suing the government for racism?

I doubt it.

This plan was reported by a generally reliably progressive writer at KOS without turning a hair.

Joan McCarter

. . . this is as "must pass" legislation as you're going to get because it has two very strong constituencies behind it, physicians and seniors.

And yet she does not utter a peep about how this screws seniors, or which seniors get screwed.

The Republicans will use any such deal to further undermine senior support for Democrats, though it is their agenda and their pressure that are behind this.

Fox News will howl with delight, and beam those howls into the homes of the very seniors most harmed by this move.