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Thursday, August 16, 2012

Mitt's Whiteboard
Posted by jurassicpork | 5:00 PM

(A Brilliant @ Breakfast Exclusive)

Since your head hostess Jill Hussein is working herself ragged in non-bloggy ways, your snotty maitre d' will have to pick up the slack and what better way to take up space and time than to talk about Mitt's little Medicare lesson in South Carolina today?

Now, Mitt's essentially fish-wifing the same Republican old wive's tales about President Obama's plan for Medicare. Now, those of you who read me on a regular basis know I have less than zero respect and even less enthusiasm for both the steaming piece of shit masquerading as "health care" that Romney left behind in 2006 or the economy-sized version cooked up by our stupendously corrupt Congress and equally corrupt Chief Executive.

But that's not to say there aren't a few good things about the ACA and how the president addressed Medicare's future solvency is among them. Now, this is how Romney presented his and Ryan's plan side by side with what the president has done.



And for the real side by side comparison that actually uses the facts, there's this:



It's very simple to grasp. Thanks to Congress and the president, the Medicare trust fund, which has operating costs of about 3%, is still going to be solvent until 2024 for both current seniors and the next generation who will retire within the next 12 years (such as myself and Mrs. JP).

Under the Romney-Ryan plan, which threatens to do for Medicare what Michael Meyers did for Halloween, their voucher system will be specifically engineered to not keep pace with health care inflation, meaning that prescription drugs, co-pays and premiums will almost immediately go up for seniors and the next generation. Plus, before Romney's first term, the trust fund will go bankrupt as a direct result of this before his first term is even over.

If Romney even had a prayer of getting elected, it's hard to see how he'd be able to spin the bankruptcy of the Medicare trust fund in an election year so that people would actually vote for him.

But, in a much more egregious and obvious manner than the ACA, which just embalmed the status quo and made it virtually universal, Romney's and Ryan's bad joke of a plan doesn't just keep Big Pharma and the HMO's on the playing field. It actually privatizes a health care system that's been more or less an unqualified success and an example of how effectively the government can make decisions for hundreds of millions of citizens in the long term.

And that's something that gives the Republican party dry heaves: An example of government that actually fucking works. And this is why Republicans are not only forced to talk about Medicare, something they never do either in and out of election years, Medicare moreso than jobs has become the biggest plank for both parties (especially since Grannykiller Ryan got the nod from Romney).

This is why they're telling the same lies about Obama's and their vision for Medicare. They're not just massaging the facts, they're hoping to buttfuck them into oblivion. Romney and Ryan are hoping that if they tell the same lies over and over and over again, they'll eventually supplant the facts and the truth.

And what better place to start than South Carolina, a state that turned away from John McCain in 2000 when Karl Rove whispered about a black child he didn't have? A state that produced a Congressman who called the president a liar during his State of the Union Address and then got millions from his constituents for violating parliamentary decorum?

History bears me out that the Republican Party consistently goes for the low-information voters, the single issue voters and the willfully ignorant. That's because Romney doesn't have an actual base and he has to Frankenstein together what few he can get from evangelicals, from racists and white supremacists, from Tea Baggers.

And in the very act of accusing the president of taking $716,000,000,000 from the Medicare system when Obama is doing the exact opposite, Republicans like Romney and Ryan are trying to scare votes away from Obama because scare tactics are all they have since they have no ideas outside of lower taxes and dreaming up schemes that further bloat the private sector.
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