Hands off Our Medicare!

[eridani]

Join this!

http://www.handsoffourmedicare.org/handsoff/
The President created the Deficit Commission to decide how to reduce the Federal deficit. The Commission has put Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security on the chopping block. We say HANDS OFF OUR MEDICARE!

[Mimosa]

1. It's about time. Good ink. n/t

[Hannah Bell]

2. America Speaks Back: The Effort to Gut Social Security and Medicare Takes a Hit

President Obama’s deficit commission is moving forward with Social Security and Medicare explicitly in their sights. They got a dry run for how this effort is likely to sell with the public on Saturday as the Peter Peterson funded group America Speaks sponsored a series of 19 “21st Century Town Meetings.” It seems that events didn’t quite go as planned.

The exercise was intended to show convince people that there were no options other than large cuts to Social Security and Medicare to hit their deficit targets. To ensure this result, the America Speaks crew put together a booklet that exaggerated future budget problems (the exercise was for the year 2025) by assuming a worse budget path than the country is currently facing.

America Speaks also excluded the possibility that the Fed would buy and hold more debt, in effect continuing its current course. This would substantially reduce the interest burden facing the country in 2025. While in normal times this could cause inflation, that is unlikely to be a problem in the foreseeable future...The America Speaks folks also denied participants the option of reducing public sector health care costs by reforming the U.S. health care system...

Given this stacked deck the participants rose up in revolt. They demanded the option to vote on a single-payer type health care system. The idea being to reduce costs by making health care more efficient rather than just cutting services in Medicare and other public sector programs. They also voted overwhelmingly for defense cuts and for every progressive tax option in the book, even though many had been seriously mischaracterized. For example, they listed the potential revenue from a financial speculation tax in 2025 as $30 billion a year even though there is good reason, based on the experience of other countries, to believe that we could raise close to ten times this amount.

http://www.healthcare-now.org/america-speaks-back-the-effort-to-gut-social-security-and-medicare-takes-a-hit/

[mdmc]

4. ..1

[Ross K]

3. Okay, NOW's the time!

K&R

[Oceansaway]

5. K&R...n/t

[burnsei sensei]

6. This is what last year's demonstrations

should have been about.

[TBF]

7. Solidarity, sister. K&R nt

[eridani]

8. Kick for Friday n/t

[leftstreet]

9. K&R