Letter 2 America for March 20, 2015

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Dear America,

The Kaiser Health Tracking Poll, which is administered by the non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation, revealed something that should be of interest to the Republican Party if they want to retain power in congress.  The poll still shows that more Americans oppose "Obamacare" than favor it, but then there is something ostensibly paradoxical that the poll adds to its assessment of popular opinion on the subject.  While 43%, down from 53% last July, oppose the Affordable Care Act, only 41%, up from 37% favor the law.  However, while there is still a slight margin  for those opposing the law rather than favoring it, only 40% favor repeal while 46% prefer that congress continue to implement the law...or expand it.  The only logical conclusion to be reached from this reliable survey of public opinion is that repeal of the ACA would be politically unpopular overall, and thus would result in a diminution, or perhaps even a loss, of the Republicans' control of the House of Representatives and The Senate.  The fact that the majority of Americans want the ACA to endure its challenges in the legislature and the courts is nothing new, and in fact Americans have always felt that the ACA was inadequate, not that it was objectionable as an overall concept, though you would never know that if you just listened to the Republicans.  But the frailty of the margin by which the American people disapprove of the law, whether because it goes too far or not far enough, may well be within the margin of error, and that has two implications.

The first is that the Republican claim that the American people oppose the law is now questionable, but by the time the next poll is taken, it will probably be an outright lie.  And when that change eventuates, all the time the Republican Party has wasted trying to repeal it will become apparent for what it is: political obstructionism in the face of a vacuum of plausible ideas on the subject within the party.  The second relates to the Republican budget proposal that was just released. It includes repeal of the ACA as part of what ostensibly is a deficit reduction package worth, the Republicans say, $5.5 trillion over the next decade, and that is the platform on which they will presumably run...for both congress and the presidency...in 2016.  As part of that deficit reduction plan, they want to change Medicare by converting it into a voucher program, but despite the smoke and mirrors that are sure to be rolled out in defense of their retreaded plan to cut a hole in the social safety net that has been built since FDR, you can't get something for nothing.  If their plan cuts government funding, the money that it saves has to come from somewhere, and it will come from us.  Thus, it will require that some people who would otherwise have been able to rely on a sound, self-funded insurance program--remember that we pay for Medicare in advance with assessments against our paychecks that go into a trust fund from which all Medicare expenditures are paid, and with small monthly premiums that come out of our Social Security checks--will no longer be able to do so in their retirement years because they won't be able to afford it.  They will lack the funds necessary to supplement their vouchers in order to acquire adequate insurance coverage for themselves...unless the ACA continues to be in effect along with the subsidies it entails.  Put concisely, the ACA is necessary to make their Medicare voucher program work, and the Democrats will surely make that point in 2016.  The Republicans have hoist themselves by their own petard, and they have built that bomb and set it off in a single document.

Set aside the rest of the proposed budget for the moment, though there are sure to be austerity measures that would change many lives for the worse if they were ever to become law.  They will just be frosting on the Democrats' cake.  But this two pronged attempt by the Republican Party to shoot itself in the foot...again...is almost a travesty.  No, it is a travesty.  It is a mockery of prudent fiscal economy as laughable as a Punch & Judy show.  While the Republicans beat their constituents over the head with the club of mock austerity, the audience--that is the rest of us voters--will be watching, but we won't be laughing as their plan is to beat us over the head too.  By 2016, it should be apparent that the Republican Party is on the side of very few of us.  There are about ten million millionaires in this country, and I would guess thousands of billionaires.  More than ten thousand households declare incomes of $10 million or more, but those ten thousand households plus whatever proportion of the ten million millionaires see fit to support them, cannot get a majority of Republicans elected to congress by themselves.  The rest of us will have to be on a hemlock diet to go along, and I don't think that a majority of the American electorate is willing to commit suicide.  The real question is this.

Will the Republicans recognize the political folly of their position on Medicare and the ACA in time to save themselves?  I don't think so.  The next iron they will shove into the fire, I predict, will be cuts in Social Security benefits--again, a program that is paid for out of a trust fund that we all contribute to just as we would to annuities provided by private insurers if there was no Social Security program.  The Social Security Trust Fund is solvent well into the 2030's, but some kind of adjustment needs to be made, and given that the disparity in the levels of prosperity favoring the top one percent of us, who own just under 40% of the wealth in America, and the bottom eighty percent of us, who own only 10%, the logical solution would seem to be raising the level of income at which FDIC contributions to the Social Security Trust Fund cease to be required.   There is no need for the elderly to stop eating beef and start eating chicken as the "chained CPI" would require, and that is where the Republicans are headed.  But if you compound the loss of disposable income required by a system of Medicare vouchers rather than the current Medicare plan with less in monthly benefits on account of the chained CPI, you wind up taking a significant bite out of every senior citizen's budget each month, and a majority of seniors have been voting Republican lately.  But I don't think they'll do so for much longer.

Your friend,

Mike

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This page contains a single entry by Michael Wolf published on March 19, 2015 10:34 AM.

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About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Michael Wolf published on March 19, 2015 10:34 AM.

Letter 2 America for March 17, 2015 was the previous entry in this blog.

Letter 2 America for March 24, 2015 is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

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