GOP Offers No Death Panels, Just Death From Lack of Care by Leo Gerard, OurFuture.org

Republicans concocted death panels in an attempt to terrify Americans about health care reform, then propagated the lie because they wanted insurance corporations to profit from illness and injury unfettered.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed anyway, but now the GOP has announced that it plans to kill the reform, and Medicaid and Medicare too.

In one fell swoop, Republicans would foreclose on Americas’ long-held and cherished expectation that they’ll receive health coverage from their government in their old age, impoverishment or infirmity. For the elderly, poor, unemployed, disabled and juvenile who can’t afford insurance, the GOP offers no death panels, just death from lack of care.

U.S. Representative Paul D. Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin and chairman of the House Budget Committee, disclosed the GOP scheme to massacre Medicare and Medicaid. Instead of the government directly paying for medical services for the elderly and impoverished, Republicans would shift costs to states and the elderly. Under their plan, instead of Medicare, the federal government would give seniors an unspecified amount of money toward the cost of premiums for private health insurance. Also, instead of Medicaid, the GOP would give states some money to help pay for insurance for the poor, which includes nursing home care for the elderly. States and the elderly then would be stuck paying insurance costs above the amount provided by the federal government.

Ryan and his GOP gang transfer medical costs to the elderly and impoverished to compensate for federal revenues lost when they slash income taxes levied on the rich and corporations by an additional 30 percent.

The GOP message to the rich and to corporations: keep your tax break and take another 30 percent. The GOP message to the middle class: pay more and lose your safety net.

Last week, the economy showed more evidence that the administration's economic stimulus programs, rescue of the auto industry, investments in clean energy, extension of unemployment compensation, past aid to the states and other measures are beginning to lead to job growth. In March, the economy added 219,000 new jobs -- bringing total private sector job growth to 1.8 million in the last 13 months.

This rate of job growth is far short of what is needed to return us to full employment -- or even the more modest levels of unemployment that preceded Bush's Great Recession. But Obama's 1.8 million new jobs is 1.8 million more than the zero net private sector jobs created in the eight years of the Bush administration using the Republican program of tax cuts for the rich.

The first decade of this century was also the first decade in our economic history that experienced no private sector job growth whatsoever. You'd think that this great experiment in trickle down economics would be enough to convince anyone with more than five brain cells to string together that trickle down economics doesn't work -- but apparently not.

Republicans in Congress are still demanding that $61 billion be cut from this years' budget -- halfway through the fiscal year. If they are successful, Moody's economic forecasting firm -- and their economist Marc Zandi, who was an advisor to Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain -- predicts that it would result in the elimination of 700,000 jobs in the United States.

And now House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R) has proposed a 2012 budget that would do even more to slam the middle class. He proposes eliminating Medicare and Medicaid and replacing them with programs that reduce health care coverage for seniors at the same time they provide a windfall for the big insurance companies.

Why do Republicans persist in demanding that we eliminate 700,000 jobs? It has to do with the influence of four major groups:

1). The CEO/Wall Street Class. Much of America's economic royalty... READ ON

2). The second influential group pushing for policies that would eliminate 700,000 jobs are the intellectuals and academics who work for the first group. And I do mean "work for."... READ ON

3). Many in the third group actually understand the budget-slashing proposals being made by Republicans in the house would cut massive numbers of jobs. This group is the Republican political class -- and they would be happy as pigs in slop to eliminate those jobs. READ ON

4). Of course the final -- and most visible -- group clamoring for draconian cuts that would cost 700,000 American their jobs is the Tea Party, and the many far-right members of the Republican caucus that.. READ ON

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We could balance the budget over the long haul without cutting programs that benefit the middle class by raising rates on the wealthy to levels below the highest rate under Ronald Reagan, treat "capital gains" as "ordinary income", cut modest amounts of military spending, require Medicare to negotiate with drug companies for cheaper prices, control health care costs with a Public Option, and eliminate "tax expenditures" like subsidies to big oil.

We need to make it clear that the budget debate is about choices -- moral choices about what is important, who should pay and who should sacrifice. The question is simple: Do Americans want to cut education and all the rest in order to give tax breaks to the wealthy and big corporations? America's answer to that question in poll after poll is a resounding no. Americans want to invest in their future, not cater to the short-term greed of our home-grown class of economic royals whose answer to the pain of middle class people is the modern-day equivalent of "let them eat cake."

The Republicans thought that the budget debate would give them the high political ground. That's why they were willing to go so far out on an extremist precipice. Now the political ground is beginning to crumble - and it's a long way down.