Eschewing Facebook, her usual platform of choice, Sarah Palin blogged an op-ed in the Wall St. Journal yesterday in which she joined other GOP pols and operatives who have recently called for killing Medicare by privatizing it:
Instead of poll-driven “solutions,” let’s talk about real health-care reform: market-oriented, patient-centered, and result-driven. As the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon and others have argued, such policies include giving all individuals the same tax benefits received by those who get coverage through their employers; providing Medicare recipients with vouchers that allow them to purchase their own coverage; reforming tort laws to potentially save billions each year in wasteful spending; and changing costly state regulations to allow people to buy insurance across state lines. Rather than another top-down government plan, let’s give Americans control over their own health care.
While Republican pols currently serving won’t dare even hint about their support for killing Medicare, those who, like Palin, are out of office, can afford to be honest about their party’s true intentions. As we noted last month, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey — now a GOP lobbyist and one of the prime, behind-the-scenes operatives in the Tea Bagger movement — described Medicare as “tyranny” on “Meet the Press.” (In 1995, Armey also said “Medicare is a program I would have no part of in a free world.”) And on August 19, Tom DeLay, the disgraced former Republican House leader, said on MSNBC’s “Hardball, “I want Medicare to be privatized. It shouldn’t be a government program. It’s the thing that is driving up costs. Not [the need] to have a public option. It’s Medicare, Medicaid and SCHIP — the government-run programs — that are running up costs. That’s where the reform ought to be.”
At least one currently seated Republican has been critical of Medicare, although he stopped short of recommending privatizing it. Earlier this year, Rep. Tom Price (R-Texas)said , “[As] a physician, I can attest that nothing has had a greater negative effect on the delivery of health care than the federal government’s intrusion into medicine through Medicare.”
The main reason sitting GOP pols keep their desire to kill Medicare secret is that is a popular program, and it tends to upset voters when they perceive it to be under threat. It didn’t help Bob Dole’s candidacy for the president in 1996 when his opponent, Pres. Clinton, rightly pointed out that Dole voted against Medicare when it was passed in 1965. Dole was also closely associated that year with then-Speaker Newt Gingrich who was caught on tape theorizing about how market forces might cause Medicare to “wither on the vine.” Dole lost to Clinton 49.2 percent to 40.7 percent.
