Paul
Ryan, the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives,
apparently thinks that the election of Donald Trump paves the way not
only for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, but for the demolition
of Medicare.
Medicare has been
the deliverance of a generation of senior citizens. It has saved
millions of us from destitution even as we have paid our way via Social
Security benefit deductions for the best health insurance plan in
American history. In my own case -- having been almost three years along
now a prostate cancer patient -- I have not had to choose between
poverty and death, in that order.
My
oncologist continues to think that I will live a normally long life of
an otherwise healthy male because of the treatment she has prescribed
for me along with quarterly bone and body scans. My pension as a
senior-status priest of the Episcopal Church, while modest, does come
with a fine Medicare supplement. By itself, though, it would be
profoundly insufficient to cover the cost of my treatment. Without
Medicare, I would quite possibly be dead and, as Dickens' Ebenezer
Scrooge put it, have helped to "decrease the surplus population."/1
That calls to mind another of my literary heroes -- to be guessed by you, dear reader.
Hero No. 2 would say that Speaker
Ryan, scurrying to make himself popular with the stern patriots in his
legislative chamber, has promised that the Medicare we know -- of which
all citizens of Canada and many European countries happily know some
version -- will be privatized with limited cash handouts given to Social
Security beneficiaries.
They
in turn will be referred to for-profit insurance companies to buy their
policies. Soon will come your call answered laconically by a bored shoe
clerk after 65 minutes of being on hold, who will tell you that
whatever you had done -- like having a cancerous tumor removed from your
whatever -- will not be covered. And, oh yes, have a nice day.
And
think of the bonanza that ending the Medicare to which we have been
accustomed would bring to the congressional budget-bargaining
discussions. What a windfall in tax reductions for the already well-off
could result if the big, bad government no longer had to fork over
billions a year to pay doctor and hospital bills for oldsters subsisting
on Social Security until that rug is pulled out from under them.
Perhaps coming soon to a theater near you.
The
other losers would be the owners of those awful places in which the
no-longer-useful elderly are placed because taking care of them at home
is no fun. Letting them succumb to whatever ailments might overtake them
would save a lot of money. Problem solved.
And anyway, doesn't the Bible tell us that "the
days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of
strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and
sorrow/2" -- surely meaning
that God is done with us at 70 or so? Why buck the Man Upstairs? Why not
spare our elderly from the labour and sorrow of getting older than God
wills? I mean, really, people.
As
has been suggested, why continue to enrich nursing home magnates? Let
them turn their charnel houses into cheap apartments and charge
outlandish rent. Or they could take their millions already sucked from
Medicare and Medicaid and invest them in one of Donald Trump's business
ventures, seeing that he'll soon be the President of the United States
for a spell. Good bet, to be sure.
In
any event, Medicare is a tool of socialism, which in reality, is a
Communist ploy to weaken the financial structure of the America that's
on its way to being great again. Let's for God's sake not stand in the
way of that! Anyway, the Bible also says, "God helps them that helps
themselves."/3
End of satire.
Even
though their craggy faces do not appear high on Mt. Rushmore, I can
sense the countenance of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and that of Lyndon
Baines Johnson gazing down upon the country they served as President.
Both gave America promise and hope -- Roosevelt with Social Security,
Johnson with Medicare. Together those federal programs have given
getting older a lot more respect.
We
who are in our late septuagenarian years began paying our way in the
former with every paycheck that came to us over as many as 60 years and
to the latter through deductions from our monthly Social Security checks
for the past dozen or so years. For many of us who never made much
money due to the career paths we chose -- or which chose us -- both the
former and the latter have contributed to a relatively peaceful
retirement and older age. Most of us don't have much, but we have enough
-- and enough to share because we think that's how life should work.
We
do not consider Social Security and Medicare to be entitlements. We are
entitled to nothing that we did not earn, even as our flight paid our
parents' Social Security and our kids are paying ours. So many of us pay
so little for Medicare precisely because there are so many of us paying
into it. We have not asked for and have not taken something for
nothing. To manage the program wisely for the long term, our Medicare
deductions could be increased by a few dollars a month, perhaps matched
by a bit of tax revenue from the coffers of the fabulously rich 1%. From
each according to her/his ability; to each according to her/his need.
Meanwhile,
we'd like it a lot if Speaker Ryan and his colleagues would refrain
from tearing down a sound and needed structure and calling the process
"reform." Far from reform, it would be grand larceny. It would rob the
now-healthy of their health care and therefore of their health.
1/ A Christmas Carol. London, G.B. Chapman & Hall. 1843. 14
2/ Psalm 90:10
3/ The Bible says no such thing.
Copyright 2016 Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.
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