‘Don’t mess with Medicare!’ voters say

By Will Parry

Politicians mess with Medicare at their peril.

Republican Congressional candidate Jane Corwin ran into that rock-hard reality May 24, when her widely expected victory in an ultra-conservative upstate New York district was upended over her stance – and her party’s – on Medicare.

Democrat Kathy Hochul won 48 percent of the vote to Corwin’s 42 percent. Tea Party candidate Jack Davis trailed with 8 percent. The district had sent Republicans to Congress for 40 years.

At the outset of the campaign, Hochul honed in on Republican Rep. Paul Ryan’s proposal to wreck Medicare by turning it into a voucher system – and she never let up. Post-election surveys confirmed that voters of both parties had chosen Hochul because they trusted her to protect Medicare.

“The results set off elation among Democrats and soul-searching among Republicans,” The New York Times reported. The results were a blow to Ryan’s proposed restructuring of Medicare, crafted to save money by sharply reducing coverage for seniors.

The Ryan proposal was incorporated in a budget adopted on a party-line vote in the Republican-controlled House.

Meanwhile, advocates warned that the integrity of Medicare was in jeopardy in bipartisan debt-reduction talks initiated by President Obama and presided over by Vice President Joseph Biden. Referring to these talks, Rep. Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 Democrat, declared that “I have said it over and over again, everything needs to be on the table. Medicare is one of the things that needs to be on the table.”

Medicaid a major GOP target

After encountering a firestorm of voter anger over their scheme to destroy Medicare by turning it into a voucher program, House Republicans are training their Congressional gun sights instead on a program that serves children and the poorest Americans: Medicaid.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee was expected to move a bill that would repeal the vital “maintenance of effort” (MOE) requirement in the health care reform law. The MOE provision blocks the states from cutting their Medicaid rolls before the establishment of health care exchanges in 2014.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that eliminating the MOE requirement would cut about 300,000 beneficiaries --- mostly children -- from the program.
The Hill, a news service that summarizes activity in Congress, quoted both Bruce Lesley, president of the children’s advocacy group First Focus, and Director Ron Pollack of Families USA, as expressing deep concern over the threat to Medicaid. “I’ve always worried that Medicare and Social Security would go off the table and Medicaid would the only thing left standing,” Lesley said.
“More than $1.3 trillion of the savings in Representative Paul Ryan’s budget proposal would come from Medicaid,” The Hill reported. “So far, those plans haven’t attracted the same political furor as the budget’s Medicare components. Some Democrats have been blunt about the reason: Seniors vote in large numbers, whereas Medicaid primarily serves children and the poor.”

Medicaid advocates are also concerned about a second proposal in the GOP budget, to convert federal Medicaid funding into block grants for the states. Either Republican proposal would be “all about rationing care and cutting people off of coverage,” Lesley, the children’s advocate, told The Hill.

But Medicaid also benefits legions of seniors. About 70 percent of the nation’s 1.4 million nursing home residents are dependent on Medicaid, the Kaiser Family Foundation reports. Medicaid also helps fill the infamous “donut hole” in Medicare’s prescription drug coverage. Democrats who support deep cuts in Medicaid as a deficit reduction measure could find themselves in serious trouble.