Lenin Would Be Pleased, Sustaining Medicare

If it's quiet, we won't make up news.  Here's all there is.  Happy to save you time.

Conservative Attacks Emulate Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Attacks on Social Security, Medicare borrow a strategy from Lenin.  For three decades, conservatives' proposals for dramatic changes to the programs have reflected a divide-and-conquer strategy inspired by the Leninist movement.  About the last thing you'd ever expect is for conservatives to draw procedural lessons from the founder of the Soviet state.  So it's fascinating to ponder the persistence of an attack on Social Security that was explicitly billed as a 'Leninist' strategy three decades ago by analysts at the Heritage Foundation and is still in use today."

"This is the notion, which is part of pretty much every proposal today to 'fix' Social Security and Medicare, that benefits for the retired and near-retired should be guaranteed, while those for everyone else must be cut."

I had never heard of this before -- and it's STUNNING.  Not that the Conservatives have been following a strategy for three decades.  But that it was so well formulated and well defined right from the start.  Not the development over time of an approach that seemed to work, but the full blown purposeful attempt to destroy Medicare and Social Security through what almost amounts to something like a pogrom.  Please read this and post a comment here.  What do you think?

Innovative Treatments

COMMENT:  "Last month the New York Times posted its recommendations for how to cope with the costs of Medicare in the future.  In their proposals for Medicare sustainability, the Times failed to include a proven strategy for lowering health care costs:  Finding innovative treatments to cure or manage costly diseases.  In doing so, the Times also misdiagnoses the remedy for reducing Medicare costs."

For Your Information

Who Knew? California May Have a Public Option -- "During the health reform debate, there was controversy and disappointment over the failure to include a public option in the Affordable Care Act.  Not only did the public option idea not die, it is alive and well in California."

MORE: From Kaiser Health News.  The Public Option Did Not Die.

The Republican Reality-Free Zone

Gingrich Suggests Illegally Firing Federal Employees Over Liberal Views

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