A Downside to the Brown Victory
David Bernstein • January 22, 2010 12:27 pm
Like others who oppose much of President Obama’s legislative agenda, I’m pleased that Scott Brown won, and even more pleased that he won relying on generally libertarian themes. There is a downside, however. From what I can tell, the swing vote for Brown, and more generally against Obama these days, is senior citizens who want to protect Medicare in its current, bloated form; Brown himself argued that he wanted to defend Medicare from Obama.
In a sense, this serves the Democrats right. For decades, any time a Republican suggested any sensible Medicare reform, the Democrats responded with a barrage of (very effective) political propaganda accusing the Republicans of wanting to eviscerate Medicare. As a result, Medicare became politically sacrosanct; the only major Republican-led reform of recent years was a massive Medicare expansion under President Bush.
I haven’t followed the pending health care legislation to know whether the proposed reforms cuts to Medicare are sensible or not, but the point is that any tinkering with Medicare to reduce costs is politically deadly. And many Medicare recipients are smart enough to recognize that if the private part of our health care system gets squeezed, the implicit subsidy that Medicare gets will inevitably be endangered.
Apparently, the Democrats believed that their decades-old creation and defense of Medicare would lead elderly voters to trust them, but instead their demagoguery on Medicare has led to the program being politically untouchable, including by Democrats. (Anecdotally, my parents’ elderly Jewish liberal New York friends and relatives, Obama supporters all, are mad as hell about the Democratic health care proposals.)
The problem, of course, is that Medicare is utterly unsustainable in it present form. One hopes that a bipartisan solution, that will be blamed on both (or neither) party can be achieved. More likely, I’m afraid, politicians will have learned that even liberal Democrats dare not mess with Medicare, and the program will gradually (further) bankrupt the country.
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