TPM's Brian Beutler has done some great background work on the catfood commission, including this look at how heavily weighted it is with conservative commissioners who have a history of promoting cuts to Social Security. Today he looks at how the dynamics are playing out in the Medicare discussions.
[T]he ideological conservatism of the Republicans on the commission -- and, indeed, of the commission as a whole -- combined with Democratic fatigue over health care reform mean that the center of gravity of discussions is tilted to the right.
"[B]asically you've got some Dems saying they don't want to jump back in the [health care reform] pool, so you've mainly got Republicans swimming in there on their own," says one source familiar with the commission's proceedings....
That leaves rigid conservatives like David Camp and Paul Ryan -- the GOP's top budget guy and author of a plan to turn Medicare into a voucher program -- at the top of the rhetorical heap. As a result, according to the second source, the commission's focus reflects their priorities much more than progressive ones.
"There have been some discussions about cost-sharing. There have been some discussions about Medi-gap policies," the source says.
At a staff level, this source says, the feeling is that "there needs to be more skin in the game and people need to pay more...the whole argument that people don't understand how much health care costs and are wasteful."
"A lot of discussion on the commission has been that people need to get better price signals and be smarter shoppers," the second source said. "And that is very, very worrisome."
In other words, more talk about how greedy seniors are milking the system to get more than their fair share. That's an easier solution to grasp than dealing with the systemic problems--and taking on the powerful interests of PhRMA and medical device manufacturers and hospitals and all the rest of the corporate interests conservatives want to protect. Telling seniors that they have to be "smarter shoppers" in a marketplace that's stacked against them isn't an answer to bringing down Medicare costs for the government.
A "fiscal" commission that doesn't grasp the very basic idea that the health care system is the major part of the cost problem, and not the individual consumers within it, isn't qualified to make policy on the issue.