At least one more old geezer — we are legion — is fed up with the Medicare generation getting all the blame for opposing health reform. James Ridgeway writes in his Unsilent Generation blog today that
This health reform debate is about substituting a phony intergenerational war for what ought to be class war – pitting the old against the young, instead of pitting the rich against the poor, or the corporations against the little guy. There WILL be cuts to Medicare, and everyone says this has to happen to keep Medicare from going bankrupt before younger people get to use it. But in fact, if pols were willing to cut the profits of insurance and drug companies, there would be enough for everyone–we could have Medicare for all.
Which does certainly cut to the chase. Ridgeway cites his own earlier writing that applied Dean Baker’s chutzpah definition to today’s economy.
The classic definition of “chutzpah” is the kid who kills both of his parents and then begs for mercy because he is an orphan. The Wall Street crew are out to top this. After wrecking the economy with their convoluted finances, and tapping the US Treasury for trillions in bail-out bucks, they now want to cut Social Security and Medicare because we don’t have the money.
I am still with President Obama on paying for reform through elimination of waste and fraud, though that’s obviously not going to happen overnight and not going to pay for it all by a long shot. But Medicare’s going to survive, as will most Medicare recipients although we are all terminal. The moments of truth will come when the bargaining is over and we learn what the trade-offs really cost. That is, whether Big Pharma and insurance industry negotiations trump the public option, and other details still near and dear to many hearts.
So many trillions, so many sectors looking to save their own skins — or their own trillions, as the case may be — can boggle the mind quickly enough to send Jane Q. Public desperately in search of simplification, and blaming a generation is easy. The Medicares don’t want to lose their benefits, the Boomers worry that there won’t be enough for them (a legitimate worry, in fact) and the people who need health care get lost in the shuffle. Ridgeway fills in a lot of blanks. Check it out.
