Mitt Romney isn’t exactly the right’s ideal messenger in this case, but I think he’s setting a dangerous precedent, and I bet others will follow it:
Romney to forgo Medicare
Mitt Romney is celebrating his 65th birthday. But unlike many seniors who reach that age, the GOP presidential candidate will forgo the Medicare program, according to a source with the Romney campaign.
“No, he’s keeping his current private insurance plan,” a Romney source told CNN….
I realize he’s also claiming that the Obama administration is gutting Medicare, while clearly making plans of his own to gut it for real, following the Paul Ryan template — but I don’t want to get into that right now. I’m worried about his refusal to take Medicare himself.
I don’t know of any wealthy pol who’s done this. I don’t know of any prominent deficit scold who’s done this. The message it sends — beyond, in Romney’s case, “Yeah, I’m rich” — is: “Fewer and fewer people should take Medicare — and Social Security, for that matter.”
Other pols will do this — it’s quite possible that it will eventually become routine for wealthy right-wing pols. And gradually the Overton window will move, until the centrist position isn’t “This is a universal entitlement” but, rather, “This is welfare. Shouldn’t you be trying to get yourself into a position where you don’t need it? If you have any sense of personal responsibility, that is?”
Now, I think the right would love to just gut Medicare and Social Security all at once, and will try to do that, as the first order of business the next time there’s a Republican president and a Republican Congress. But I think it’s going to be a tough fight. So Plan B will be to do to entitlements what’s been done to abortion: If a ban is impossible, just keep trying to wear the public down, until what was once a settled part of American life becomes unsavory. Kill your target by degrees.
Romney’s the first to do this. He won’t be the last. Eventually the right may try to make any comfortably middle-class person feel guilty about taking advantage of these programs.
(X-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.)
I wonder if he’s REALLY keeping his own plan, though…by that age, premiums are outrageous for anyone who’s not a millionaire, to the point that middle class people do not have this option. Heck, upper middle class people don’t have the option. This is really only a super-rich type of deal.
And if it is a truly private plan, and his plan fails to pay out when he needs it, my understanding is he’s still allowed to jump on Medicare at any time, right?
In other words, he’d be the use case that the mandate for Obama’s health plan was designed to avoid.
Does he still get HC through the state of Massachusetts? And don’t forget, he can’t take Medicare at this point given all the bullshit he’s spewing.
I just don’t see this ever becoming a winning argument for the right and their uber-rich cronies. Shaming people into refusing Medicare? It doesn’t take much for people to realize just how financially far removed Romney is from the situation faced by even hard-working, two income families. It becomes just laughable.
Remember during the infancy of the Tea Party, when people set up tables with fake petitions to try and get Tea Party people to actually sign on for the Medicare and Social Security policy they were screaming for from their elected officials??? GET THE GOVERNMENT OUT OF MY HEALTH CARE AND RETIREMENT!!! As I recall, there were not a whole lot of takers on that.
I know they will have the help of the right-wing media with this, but it still seems like he’s pissing into the wind.
Mitt is following in the hallowed footsteps of GOP icon Ayn Rand, shunning Medicare as a horrible intrusion of government into healthcare.
Oh, wait!
The problem for the Republicans is that, with this economy, MORE older people need these programs, not fewer. I can’t imagine there are too many people of retirement age who would see any reason to refuse getting support from a fund they paid into their whole working lives, and even fewer who are cavalier enough not to see some benefit from it. Consequently, it just makes guys like Romney look like the over-privileged fucks they are.
Some small irreducible cadre of GOP supporters — I’d estimate about 27% — could be cozened or browbeaten into such action, but too many families depend on Medicare for mom and dad’s very survival. The kids — members of the first generation to go backwards economically — certainly can’t afford to pick up the slack. They’ll make mom and dad take the insurance.
Due to the right’s other policies, the set of comfortably middle-class persons is rapidly approaching zero.
You have a point there.
I disagree with you.
until middle class WHITE PEOPLE can ‘walk away’ from Medicare…
it ain’t going nowhere.
Most likely when he tries to make a claim, his private insurance provider will refuse to pay the amount that would have been covered by Medicare.
I wouldn’t worry – rich men are not that capable of shaming middle-class people. And, nobody believes a word he says.
what everyone else said. who can afford to turn down medicare?
“Kill your target by degrees.”
They’ve already begun. The Indiana General Assembly just approved a measure to pull out of federally funded health care (except Medicare) and administer the programs itself along with several other states by way of an animal known as the Health Care Compact.
You can imagine who’s pushing it, as a states rights initiative, for one thing. One immediate giveaway is a big photo of the Constitution that’s the first thing you see on the Health Care Compact Alliance home page. Want to hazard a guess who the chairman of Health Care Compact Alliance is?
Here’s the money quote:
So once they slide this through Congress (if they’re able) they can change any damn thing they choose having to do with our federally funded health care. A nifty side benefit would be a huge pot of federal cash with which to sweeten up the political friendships of those in power. Interesting times indeed.
Here’s a state by state scorecard on Health Care Compact activity. Indiana’s has not yet been added to the list.
well they’re definitely after the pot of gold. Is this coming from ALEC?
It certainly appears to be a part of the ‘Grand Plan’, doesn’t it?
Best comment over at Steve’s own blog on this:
And as I said over there, Romney is beating Obama in the latest ABC/Washington Post poll. So he’s not the universally despised laughingstock a lot of us seem to think he is.
I’m less worried than I expected to be about this campaign. So Romney’s a bit ahead in a single national poll, when nearly all the campaigning so far has been multiple Republican candidates and their supportive PAC’s raining down a storm of fantastical, slimy bullshit on Obama and the Federal government in general. Obama’s team will have the money to get their message out, the President is a terrific campaigner and Romney is…less so (!), and the economy is improving. If the economy isn’t undermined severely, Obama is in a good position.
Oh, BooMan, forget this noise about Romney leading the way on Medicare’s destruction. Anyone from the upper middle class on down who is close enough to Medicare age to make them a persuadable will see this and say, “Wow, this Romney guy is one megarich, elitist mofo!” People see Medicare as the life raft it is through their lower-income years; this has remained true through years and years of GOP B.S. on Federal health care programs. You can fool a lot of people about a lot of things, but this one won’t work.
In fact, I’m anxious to see Mitt take this one on the road.