Through the Back Door

Posted on November 22, 2011 at 3:00 pm by JM Ashby

It’s no secret that the Republicans, including those appointed to the Super Committee, were never going to sign off raising taxes or even other measures that would lead to respectable increases in revenue. In fact one of the major sticking points during committee negotiations was the Republican request for a permanent extension of the Bush Tax Cuts.

What was unknown until now is that the Republicans on the committee were also trying to sneak the privatization and voucherization of Medicare and Medicaid through the back door.

Democrats on the committee made it clear that the new spending called for in the president’s health law was off the table. Still, committee Republicans offered to negotiate a plan on the other two health-care entitlements—Medicare and Medicaid—based upon the reforms included in the budget the House passed earlier this year. [...]

Republicans on the committee also offered to negotiate a plan based on the bipartisan “Protect Medicare Act” authored by Alice Rivlin, one of President Bill Clinton’s budget directors, and Pete Domenici, a former Republican senator from New Mexico. Rivlin-Domenici offered financial support to seniors to purchase quality, affordable health coverage in Medicare-approved plans. These seniors would be able to choose from a list of Medicare-guaranteed coverage options, similar to the House budget’s approach—except that Rivlin-Domenici would continue to include a traditional Medicare fee-for-service plan among the options.

If for some reason you require further confirmation that the Republicans aren’t really serious at all about the federal deficit, here it is. They chose to use this opportunity to further their social agenda of privatizing government rather than address the fiscal problems the committee was intended to tackle.

The Republicans also must have known that the Democrats would never accept their terms for an agreement, which would seem to suggest that they were counting on the failure of the committee just as much as the Democrats were.

You may have noticed that the Republicans rarely even mention the federal deficit anymore, and that’s primarily because President Obama has robbed them of the argument.

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  • GrafZeppelin127

    You may have noticed that the Republicans rarely even mention the federal deficit anymore, and that’s primarily because President Obama has robbed them of the argument.

    Well, that and the fact that their voters effectively robbed them of the argument by handing them the House of Representatives last year. The GOP knows full well that the Republican House could stop all federal spending and balance the budget tomorrow if they wanted to. As Bob points out, they don’t want to, but even if they did, they couldn’t. They know that sudden, instantaneous, arbitrary, wholesale elimination of over a trillion dollars in annual spending would, metaphorically speaking, blow up the world.

    • muselet

      They know that sudden, instantaneous, arbitrary, wholesale elimination of over a trillion dollars in annual spending would, metaphorically speaking, blow up the world.

      You have somewhat more faith in the reasoning ability of Rs, especially the TP freshmen, than I.

      Paul Ryan (to give but one example), I have no doubt, genuinely believes that zeroing the federal budget—except for the bits he likes, of course—would make the economy boom like never before. He knows this because Ayn Rand created several book-like artifacts that say so. (Never mind that Rand’s creations are marketed as fiction—it says so right on the jacket—he is convinced they provide real insights into economics and human behavior.) He’s not the only one, either.

      –alopecia

  • dildenusa

    Ever since Nixon and the southern strategy, the republicans have been much more adept at marketing ideas in order to win elections. Ronnie Raygun and his disciples took this to a whole new level. It worked because the ideas they were marketing had broad appeal but privatization of health care insurance for the disabled and impoverished families and senior citizens was not one of them. But now the tea party republics have figured out that manufacturing a crisis or using a real crisis but making it seem infinite times worse than it really is can be used to frighten people into accepting a false reality.

    I am really offended by this. And I believe that the democrats on the super committee were offended by this also. At some point nobody is fooled anymore when your ideas are completely devoid of any basis in reality.