As someone who receives Medicare and Social Security, I've tried and usually failed to adequately explain why I'm opposed to any form of means testing on either Social Security or Medicare. Fortunately Paul Krugman can do it quite well.
Reducing the subsidy is a fancy way of say we're going to collect more from you for something you paid for through your career ... so we can convince you that Medicare is welfare. In other areas, user fees are collected for basic government service. Consider it the Republican sick phobia about honesty in calling a tax a tax.
Krugman hits out of the ballpark again with his blog entry on Means Testing, noting that "if you want the well-off to pay more, it’s just better to raise their taxes." more below the fold.
Krugman says in his Conscience of a Liberal (July 24, 2011):
"So what’s the difference between means-testing and just collecting a bit more taxes? The answer is, class warfare — not between the rich and poor, but between the filthy rich and the merely affluent. For a tax rise would get a significant amount of revenue from the very, very rich (because they have so much money), while means-testing would end up imposing the same burden on $400,000 a year working Wall Street stiffs that it imposes on billion-a-year hedge fund managers.
"What we need is actual control of health costs. Means-testing of Medicare is just a badly designed, unfair form of taxation."
Krugman's argument is short and to the point, but it elegantly hammers the point home that means testing is bad.
New York Times link here.