It's helped millions of seniors deal with costs of health care, it's a program Republicans would love to
[T]he situation is far better than it was five decades ago, when half of the elderly population had no insurance at all. Studies have shown that Medicare has meant substantially smaller out-of-pocket spending for seniors and maybe (though not certainly) longer lives. The financial protection that the program provides to beneficiaries helps explain why just one in 10 seniors now lives in poverty. That’s roughly a third of what it was in the mid-1960s.Although Medicare (and Medicaid and Social Security) are firmly embedded in American life, to Republicans it all represents "big gummint" taking us down the path to dependence and socialism (the linked Jonathan Cohn article contains a hoot of an embedded video of Republican St. Ronnie of Hollywood denouncing Medicare as taking America down the path to a "socialist dictatorship" - a reminder that the apocalyptic rhetoric of the far right wasn't any more sane 50 years ago than it is today). As Cohn notes:
These days, perhaps mindful of the program’s popularity, conservatives use more delicate language when they talk about Medicare. Rather than focus on the supposed havoc the program wreaks on America's medical system or psyche, they dwell on the toll it takes on the American taxpayer -- and call for changes that supposedly would not affect workers at or near retirement age. Just last week, Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor seeking the Republican presidential nomination, told a conservative audience that we "need to figure out a way to phase out this program for [younger people] and move to a new system that allows them to have something -- because they’re not going to have anything.”The Republican approach that J.E.B.! favors, "phasing out" Medicare for future generations, addresses the potential of future shortfalls by shifting to a program that offers seniors a sum of money and let's them fend for themselves in the private market (essentially the Social Security privatization scheme floated by Republicans like Rep. Paul "Lyin" Ryan (R-Galt's Gulch)).
As far as Medicare, we'll let the Baltimore Sun summarize for us:
... It's easy to lose track of what life was like for seniors in the United States before the program arrived. Five decades ago, only about half of seniors had health insurance coverage and, largely as a result, about 30 percent lived below the poverty line. Today, nearly all seniors have coverage, and the percentage living below the poverty line has fallen by an estimated 75 percent.
That's made Medicare among the most successful federal programs ever devised. The quality of life for older Americans has been raised astronomically, and the public's broad support for Medicare is likely to thwart ill-considered efforts to close it to the next generation. It's still possible to make the system more effective and efficient, of course. In Maryland, the waiver granted a year ago to the state by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has reduced Medicare-related hospital reimbursements substantially by providing a stronger incentive to keep beds empty. We need to employ that kind of "smarter" health care to meet 21st century needs cost-effectively, not to abandon a "Great Society" program that's worked for generations.(Photo: President Lyndon Johnson signing the Medicare act in Independence, MO, July 30, 1965 - with President Harry S Truman, at right, looking on. At the ceremony, Truman became the first American enrolled in Medicare and the first to get a Medicare card.)
