Republicans don’t even believe what they are saying

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

So now I'm supposed to believe that the Republican Party is the defender of Medicare? Seriously?

In my lifetime Republicans have castigated Medicare as the gateway drug to socialism (Saint Ronnie Reagan got his political start opposing Medicare as socialism in 1961) and they have sought to either kill or reduce funding to the Medicare program in every Congress since the program was first enacted in 1965.

In April 2009, 137 Republicans voted in support of a GOP alternative budget. It didn’t generate a lot of attention, but the plan, drafted by the House Budget Committee’s Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) called for “replacing the traditional Medicare program with subsidies to help [future] retirees enroll in private health care plans.” Republicans Against Medicare The GOP alternative budget contained a "policy statement on Medicare" calling for gradual conversion of Medicare from government insurance to government-subsidized and government-approved private insurance.

The statement set down a policy of enacting legislation "to ensure the Medicare benefit continues to provide health care coverage for seniors" through a new method "to make the program solvent and fiscally sustainable." It specifically called for legislation that "preserves the current Medicare program for individuals 55 and older." For younger persons, however, it called for the government to provide subsidies, equivalent to "100 percent of the cost of the Medicare benefit," for the purchase of private insurance "from a menu of Medicare-approved plans, similar to options available to Members of Congress." Senior Scare, Yet Again | FactCheck.org

The full debate on the GOP budget alternative, formally known as "amendment number 4" to House Concurrent Resolution number 85, may be read in the Congressional Record of April 2, 2009, starting on page H4469 and continuing through page H4487. The "Policy Statement on Medicare" appears on page H4474, and we have excerpted the full text of that statement here:

⬐ Click to expand/collapse the full text ⬏

This proposal was similar to the Bush proposal to privatize Social Security. Republicans paid the price for that hubris. The AP noted at the time that Republican leaders were “clearly nervous that votes in favor of the GOP alternative [budget] have exposed their members to political danger.” Yeah, only if our feckless corporate news media actually reports it.

Now Republicans expect us to believe that they are defending Medicare in a cynical fear mongering attempt to scare the elderly into opposing health care reforms for working age Americans.

Everybody imbo, how low can they go? Medicare recipients should be offended that Republicans have so little respect for your intelligence that they thought they could get away with treating you like an ignorant child.

Rachel Maddow does an excellent take down of this latest GOP fear mongering fraud.

Highlights from the transcript 'The Rachel Maddow Show' for Monday, September 28:

MADDOW: Belated salvo in the scare the bejesus out of elderly voters so they‘ll put you back in power regardless of whether you‘re telling the truth war is an editorial in the conservative newspaper, “The Washington Times,” and it screams “Death Panels by Proxy”—ostensibly argues that the so-called Baucus bill on health reform encourages doctors to withhold health care from Medicare patients.  Health care reform is a secret plot to kill people on Medicare.

This is now become an ongoing strategic conundrum. How do you plan to win an argument with opponents who are undeterred by being disproven?  Undeterred by the facts, when you don‘t even believe that they believe what they‘re arguing anymore?

It‘s not even just the “death panels” nonsense now. Take Medicare itself, a program Republicans have railed against since before President Johnson signed it into law in 1965. They railed against it since then until—well, until now.

Now, in the Senate Finance Committee, Republicans are trying to portray themselves as the champions of Medicare.  They‘re fighting hard to kill any bill that contains any cuts in Medicare, even though people who support Medicare like, say, the AARP, say those cuts won‘t affect care.

Republicans defending Medicare.  What would Ronald Reagan say? These guys do remember Ronald Reagan, don‘t they?

Here‘s what he did say about Medicare when it was just a twinkle in some socialist, fascist, freedom-hating, community-organizing Democrat‘s eye.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

RONALD REAGAN: We can write to our congressmen and to our senators.  We can say right now that we want no further encroachment on these individual liberties and freedoms.  And that the moment, the key issue is, we do not want socialized medicine.  Write those letters now, call your friends and tell them to write them.

If you don‘t, this program, I promise you, will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow, and behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country.  Until, one day, as Norman Thomas said, we will awake to find that we have socialism.  And if you don‘t do this and if I don‘t do it, one of these days, you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children‘s children what it once was like in America when men were free.

MADDOW: That was Ronald Reagan, 1961, on a record sent out by the American Medical Association when they really opposed it. Republicans have been echoing that anti-Medicare sentiment ever since.

* * *

MADDOW: Yet now, the Republican Party expects voters to believe that as of this week, the last half-century never happened.

Earlier this year, 137 members of the House voted for an alternative budget plan which called for abolishing Medicare for every American who‘s under age 55, and it would force all of those people who would otherwise expect to become eligible for Medicare instead onto the private insurance market. That was this year.

But now, Republicans want to portray themselves as the champions of Medicare, the people you can trust to preserve it against those evil Democrats. Yes. Forget all that stuff that happened in the past.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (I), VERMONT: It is totally absurd, and I think the American people and especially seniors who know the Republican record on Medicare will see right through this hypocrisy.

One can only hope, Bernie.