Response to Rep. Glenn Thompson's shameless attempt to mislead constituents re. GOP Medicare plan

Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA) recently published a letter to the editor of my hometown newspaper, The Lock Haven Express, trying to assure voters that the GOP's only goal was to "secure Medicare for all seniors and future generations." (Here's the link to his original letter, published on May 3: http://www.lockhaven.com/page/content.detail/id/531387/Securing-Medicare-for-all-seniors-and-future-generations.html?nav=5006 ). Below is the text of my response to Thompson, published in the same paper on May 11.

A lot of smoke and mirrors

May 11, 2011

By MARK P. KESSINGER - Former Resident of the area

Regarding U.S. Rep. Glenn Thompson's May 3 letter, in which he attempts to spin what the GOP proposes to do with respect to Medicare, clearly Thompson has either not read the section of U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan's proposed budget that deals with Medicare, or else he is willfully attempting to pull the wool over his constituents' eyes with regard to what is being proposed.

For the record, here is how the proposed plan by Republicans would work. Their budget proposes to give "premium support payments" to people turning 65 in 2022 to offset costs for purchases of private insurance policies. Without the Medicare option, people will be forced to buy private policies and pay greater out-of-pocket expenses for the privilege.

Beneficiaries enrolled in these private plans would have to pay all costs for premiums and care in excess of the Fed's "premium support payment" to insurance companies. For example, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the total cost to provide health care benefits in 2022 for a typical 65-year-old enrollee would run about $20,500. Under the Ryan/GOP plan, the federal government would offset that cost by $8,000 - or 39 percent - and the enrollee would be responsible for the remaining $12,500. This additional $12,500 would be borne by each individual every year. And that amount constitutes nearly half of the annual Social Security income for an average-earning person. Additionally, although the amount of the government voucher would be adjusted for overall inflation, any rise in premium costs beyond the rate of overall inflation would be absorbed entirely by seniors - and health insurance premiums have been outpacing overall inflation for decades.

It amounts to a dismantling of Medicare as we know it. More importantly, it feeds the very beast that has been one of the core causes of our ever-rising health care costs: the private, for-profit insurance industry.

Thompson goes on to suggest that anyone who has a major problem with the plan is guilty of "politics before problem solving." No, Mr. Thompson, it is a matter of naming a radical, immoral proposal - one which does nothing to address the actual issue of controlling medical costs and merely shifts the burden ($12,500 in new premium costs per year per that each senior would be forced to fork over to private insurance companies) to those who can least afford it - for what it truly is.

Make no mistake: Republicans have been opposed to Medicare from the moment it was enacted into law in 1964. In the years of debate leading up to its enactment, Ronald Reagan made ominous-sounding radio commercials against enacting the program, ominously warning listeners that "one of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine." Fortunately, Congress had the good sense to ignore Reagan's communist-under-every-rock fear mongering.

In the mid-1990s, Republicans under Newt Gingrich's leadership went so far as to shut down the government because President Bill Clinton refused to sign a balanced budget bill that called for drastic cuts in Medicare. The cause was later taken up by Michael Steele and again by Newt Gingrich. And John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign platform called for reductions of $1.3 trillion from Medicare over a period of 10 years. It is wise to keep this long-standing opposition to the program in mind whenever any Republican politician - Thompson included - attempts to peddle the line that the GOP's primary concern is to "secure the program for future generations."

There is yet another, and even more disturbing, dimension to the GOP's attempted subterfuge on this issue. In the very budget in which they seek to force seniors on fixed incomes to take thousands upon thousands of dollars each year out of their pockets and use it to further enrich the already gargantuan private insurance industry, they simultaneously seek, once again, to lower the top tax rate on our very wealthiest citizens from 35 percent to 25 percent. The very wealthy, who have realized virtually all of the gains in wealth over the past 30 years while the wealth of the rest of us has, remained flat or has even declined some in real dollars, would again be given a tax windfall. That would put our top tax rate at the same level it was during - get this - the Coolidge administration in the 1920s! The fact that they are proposing any tax cuts at all at a time like this clearly demonstrates that the Republican Party, for all its huffing and puffing about spending and the deficit, is nothing more than smoke and mirrors. Likewise, there is still wide support among GOP members of Congress for continuing to pay oil subsidies to oil companies who posted all-time record profits in 2010.

So who is really "placing politics above problem solving" here? No doubt, both parties have done their share of political posturing. but when a politician such as Thompson categorically claims such posturing to be exclusively on the part of those opposed to his party's extremist agenda, without offering any substantive counter-argument to the objections raised, it becomes pretty obvious where the posturing really lies.

Thompson concludes his letter with a vague assurance that he will "fight against any proposal that runs counter to principles" of "protect health and retirement security for all Americans and future generations." The problem with that is that the GOP's definition of what constitutes such "health and retirement security" appears to be rather different from the way many American citizens define it. Voters are not your children, Rep. Thompson, and deserve considerably more by way of specifics as to what, exactly, you will fight against. They do not deserve condescending assurances - devoid of any substance - telling them, in effect, "Don't worry, I've got this."

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Mark P. Kessinger is a resident of New York, N.Y., and a former resident of the area.

as a reference. Well done!

Why not shop it around as an op-ed in other papers?

Kudos!