The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has gone public with a new web site: Don’t End Medicare.
The howls of the Republicans are filling the nation. They claim, of course, that they did NOT vote to END Medicare. They just voted to CHANGE it. To make it BETTER.
Yeah. Right.
Noble Prize winning economist Paul Krugman comments succinctly on the Republicans cries of dismay and objection:
DCCC will be out today with a brutal (and misleading) slogan, “VOTE REPUBLICAN – END MEDICARE”
It’s not misleading! I know that serious people are supposed to be shocked, shocked at the Democrats calling the Ryan plan a plan to dismantle Medicare — but that’s just what it is. If you replace a system that actually pays seniors’ medical bills with an entirely different system, one that gives seniors vouchers that won’t be enough to buy adequate insurance, you’ve ended Medicare. Calling the new program “Medicare” doesn’t change that fact.
About that ‘make it better’ claim? Well, Krugman offers up the bar chart that makes it all pretty clear for anyone who wants to actually look at the facts.
As Matt Yglesias explains in regard to the new slogan, “VOTE REPUBLICAN – END MEDICARE”:
I don’t normally like to just repeat things, but I think it’s important for all progressives on the Internet to draw a line in the sand under this one. There is nothing even slightly misleading about that slogan. “Medicare” refers to a single-payer universal health insurance program instituted by the Social Security Act of 1965. If a political movement committed to having that program “wither on the vine” and die puts forward a bill to abolish that program and replace it with a system of private vouchers, then it doesn’t matter whether or not the voucher program is still called Medicare. That’s what House Republicans voted to do, and there’s nothing even slightly misleading about calling this an effort to end Medicare. What’s misleading is the effort to use nomenclature to obscure the nature of the change.
This post has been faxed to Representative Todd Young, IN-09; Indiana Senators Dick Lugar and Daniel Coats; The White House; House Speaker John Boehner; Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid; House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi; Rep. Paul Ryan, R-WI; and and posted on this web site, http://keepamericafree.com. The web site provides links to documents on the web supporting the statements in this letter.
