Medicare Election Politics

Mother Jones wrote about The Democrats' Medicare Problem. "Republicans have already launched an ad against Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-Ca.), a Democrat representing a Northern California swing district, Politico reports. In the television ad, Republicans claim that 'McNerney and President Obama's Medicare plan empowers bureaucrats to interfere with doctors, risking seniors' access to treatment. Now, Obama's budget plan lets Medicare go bankrupt: That'd mean big cuts to benefits. Tell McNerney to stop bankrupting Medicare.'"

This of course is amazingly hypocritical since the GOP plan is to replace Medicare with vouchers that are too small to pay for coverage if you could find an insurer willing to insure seniors. The article explains,

"The first sentence of the ad refers to a new Medicare payment advisory panel created by Obama's Affordable Care Act. The ACA empowers an independent, Senate-approved group of experts to reduce Medicare costs—so long as their actions don't ration care, increase premiums, or decrease coverage. In terms of keeping wasteful spending and costs down, it's one of the most important pieces of the federal reform—and one of the most widely misunderstood, reviled by the GOP as the new "death panel." House Democrats were wary of supporting the panel to begin with, and concerned about its ability to bypass legislators. (Congress can still vote to override the panel's decisions, but the panel doesn't need advance approval to act.) Now a small but growing number of Dems have signed on to a GOP effort to scrap the panel, known as the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB)."

About this, digby wrote Offense Defense. "This should be a slam dunk for the Democrats but only if they take an exceedingly hard line and don't waver. If they start capitulating and wavering, they'll lose the most valuable political advantage they've built up over 60 years. Dems should just say 'we created social security and Medicare, we protected it when the Republicans tried to end them over and over again, and you can trust us to keep them strong now.' Seniors are old enough to remember that history."

Meanwhile, Ezra Klein explains, America’s waiting times are the worst in the developed world. "Any discussion of waiting times must begin with the observation that France, Germany, Switzerland and many other developed nations manage to combine universal access to care with rapid access to care. It’s an unfortunate quirk of international health-care policy that Canada and England, the two countries that do struggle with waiting times, happen to be the two nearby, English-speaking countries in the sample, and so our impressions of government-run health-care systems are disproportionately influenced by their experiences. That said, it’s important to understand that America also struggles with waiting times. Someone who can’t afford to go to the doctor, or can’t afford to purchase an elective surgery, waits. In some cases, they wait forever. In some cases, they’re killed by the delay. But we don’t count them as having “waited” for care, and so they don’t show up in measures of American waits."