An Open Letter to Americans Who Hate Obamacare and Support Paul Ryan's Health Care Plan... Yet Demand Your Medicare, Too.
My Fellow Americans,
It is time to exercise your Constitutional rights to free speech and assembly.
Don your tea bag-dangling tricorn hat.
Unfurl your Gadsden flag.
Get out the markers and poster board (and Google the word "fascist" before you write, just to make sure you spell it right.
Cherry-pick your favorite Constitutional quotes, and put fresh batteries in your megaphone.
Conjure your dewy-eyed visions of the men you think the Founding Fathers were (pro-tip: don't read this).
Do this, for it is time for Occupy Paul Ryan's Front Yard, where you'll send him a message so loud and clear that the Liberty Bell clangs once again with peals of pure freedom:
"Slash Medicare spending for everyone, especially me, immediately! To exclude me from the cuts would be thieving, income-redistributing socialism!"
The meritocracy myth aside, you talk a pretty good game about personal responsibility, and about how wealth should be allocated to those who work hard and do the right thing. So it's now time for you to pull yourself up by the ol' bootstraps and reap what you've sowed.
For decades, health care in America has been careering down an unsustainable path of doom. You--not me, not my friends, not my children, not those mooching minorities or indolent working poor, not the commie liberals, but you--should pay the heaviest price for this.
Ah, I can hear the protestations already: "But I paid into Medicare my whole life! I deserve it!"
No you don't. In a moral sense, perhaps you do, but not in an economic sense. Medicare is pay-as-you-go, and while you did indeed pay into it throughout your working life, costs are much higher now than before, and may continue to skyrocket for some time. This, combined with increased longevity, means that you stand to receive much, much more than you gave. And you flatly refuse to raise taxes of any kind, much less taxes on yourself, to help offset this imbalance. News flash: I know you really really really want to balance the budget and get your Medicare too, but it ain't gonna happen if we don't raise taxes on someone (and cut spending on top of this). There simply isn't enough "big government" to eliminate. This is an insight that economics experts refer to as "basic acknowledgment of reality."
The Ryan solution is no solution at all. It does virtually nothing to contain aggregate costs. When it comes to Medicare, it does only two things: 1.) cynically lavish you, the self-described big government-hater, with bountiful Medicare spending, while leaving untold thousands of children without health insurance and 2.) gradually phase in a "premium support plan" that drastically underestimates the costs of insurance, thus leaving future generations high and dry.
What could possibly be seen as unfair about that?
We, the people who support universal health care, work hard for our money. But we are also happy to help out--through reasonable tax increases--our fellow Americans who are elderly or ill. But for this to work, everyone must pitch in and promote the general welfare. You say you want your Medicare, yet you vote for politicians who start witless, unfunded wars; slash taxes for the wealthy; and destroy a national budget that was balanced not too long ago by one of those... um... "fiscally irresponsible" Democrats. (I know, I know, now you say Dubya was a RINO. But admit it: you adored him back in the 2000s.) You have never, at any juncture, bothered to confront America's health care crisis seriously and soberly. You think you deserve Medicare? Well, it looks to me like you've failed to do your part in preserving it. Rather than lambasting liberals, you should kneel at our feet and thank us profusely, because if it weren't for our tireless efforts to combat your agenda over the last 30 years, your Medicare would've been long gone, long ago.
We're liberals, which means we're super-nice. So as much as we disagree with you politically, we'll do everything we can to prevent you from dying on the hospital steps. But since you're someone who apotheosizes "strong principles and convictions," we suggest you walk the walk, and follow your presumptions to their logical conclusion. This means insisting, with your characteristic choler, that you receive drastic cuts to your Medicare. You wouldn't want to be one of those "to each according to his need" types, now would you? Because that's what you are right now, whether or not you want to admit it (hey, maybe we're not so different after all)!
It didn't have to be this way. Smart, sustainable solutions have been there all along. But it was all just too freedom-hating for you.
Not too long ago, as I'm sure you remember, those nasty partisan Democrats grudgingly accepted a Heritage Foundation-devised plan and passed it into law, with no help from you. We don't even like it that much, because as far as universal health care policies go, it sounds like some slimy, ideologically-blinkered, unnecessarily Rube Goldberg-esque idea that only a right-winger would come up with. But we support it anyway, because at least it makes a rational, pragmatic attempt to control costs and expand coverage. But now, according to you, even that is a slippery slope to Maoism.
Every time this topic arises, you merely respawn the moldy old "inefficient government bureaucracy" canard. Have you never had to deal with a private insurance company--the inscrutable, obfuscatory forms; the endless evasions; the money spent on marketing, profits and other overhead costs instead of actual health care; the third-party and fourth-party and fifth-party providers involved, none of whom have any idea what the others are doing? Compared to that, the VA health care system is sleek, sensible and cost-saving, as has been empirically demonstrated time and time again. Why don't we just universalize that? Oh yeah, that's right--it's Marxist. Sorry. Bad idea. I guess.
I hear that the Koch brothers have kindly chartered some star-spangled buses, and they're almost ready to head over to Paul Ryan's house; they just have to fill up the tanks with Koch brothers-inflated (er, I mean, job creator-... deflated?) gas. Better jump on board. Oh, and don't forget your colonial tailcoat and Founding Father wig! For this is an occasion for which you must dress dandily: the day you stand up, raise your fists to a sky wheeling with bald eagles, and cry out, with a sound as stentorian as a musket shot in the dawn of April 19, 1775:
"I hold the truth of personal responsibility to be self-evident. Thus, I demand to be duly bankrupted when the cancer finally consumes my pancreas. And then I'll dump the debt onto my family and everyone else!"
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