In which Ezra Klein suggests a "kinder,gentler" version of media darling Paul Ryan's Medicare killing plan.....
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
So Klein writes a post titled "Is Obama secretly the greatest Republican ever?" regarding Michele Bachmad's criticism of Medicare and healthcare reform. He catches the irony of Bachmad :
Michele Bachmann, speaking at the Republican Leadership Conference, accused the president of being insufficiently committed to socialism -- or at least to single-payer health care. “The president’s plan for senior citizens is Obamacare,” Bachmann said. “I think very likely – and I’m speculating – I think very likely what the president intends is that Medicare will go broke, and ultimately that answer will be Obamacare for senior citizens.”
By now, anyone paying attention should be aware that Profit Protection and Unaffordable Care Act (PPUCA) Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) is based on a plan developed by the nut cases at Heritage Foundation (which later became Romneycare in MA) with some pseudo-"regulations".
Klein then looses his bearings. He serves the bipartisanshit sandwich suggests that the grand bargain/long-term solution to save Medicare/Medicaid is to "PPACA" them- exactly what Bachmad (falsely) accuses Obama of . In other words, take the 2 single-payer systems and convert into products of the for-profit, murder-by-spreadsheet health insurance industry in the free market paradise. A classy beltway/village/Versailles solution where you improve a product/service by destroying it. What better work for those grannies and the poor other than go shopping for insurance in the free market paradise and pay for the obscene pay packages of the industry overlords? Maybe that way they will end up in heaven and have a better after life.
Dear Klein, you got it ass backwards. How about replacing PPACA by Medicare ? How about saving Medicare by expanding it to all? Your mentality is very symptomatic of what Chris Hedges called "The death of the liberal class". Thoroughly bankrupt in ideas because of the tunnel vision, unable to think outside the box, you regurgitate the right wing talking points.
Corrente does an awesome takedown (Corrente's comments bolded, bolding mine) :
Ironically, bringing ObamaCare to Medicare is an obvious long-term compromise on health care [Oh, good]. If Republicans can make their peace with the [Heritage Foundation-authored] Affordable Care Act and help figure out how to make the Affordable Care Act's exchanges work to control costs and improve quality [and if weasels fly out of my butt, because that's exactly what a profit-driven system cannot do], it'd be natural [in Versailles] to eventually migrate Medicaid and Medicare into the system [thereby gutting two single payer systems]. Liberals would like that because it'd mean better care for Medicaid beneficiaries [prove it] and less fragmentation in the health-care system [see under "mess of pottage, sell birthright for"]. Conservatives would like it because it'd break the two largest single-payer health-care systems in America and turn their beneficiaries into consumers [meaning that liberals get a hypothetical outcome, and conservatives get a known one]. But the implementation and success of the Affordable Care Act is a necessary precondition to any compromise of this sort. You can't transform Medicaid and Medicare until you've proven that what you're transforming them into is better [yes, you can. You just loot them]. Only the Affordable Care Act has the potential to do that [also, too, single payer experiments in the states, like VT, which you just wrote off, YOU PUTZ].
Note : Klein does it again - this time serving a turd sandwich of a review of the excellent documentary "Inside Job" on the lines of "who coulda/woulda known about the crash of 2008?". It reads like an apologia for the financial terrorists that make up the Bush/Clinton/Obama economic "Wrecking Crew". Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism lays into Klein in her post starting right from the title "Ezra Klein Should Stick to Being Wrong About Health Care":