Opinion: Deconstructing ‘Medicare isn’t a government program’
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It’s easy to make fun of cranky senior citizens and town-meeting hooligans who seem to believe that Medicare isn’t a government program. President Obama joined in the fun at an AARP event last month:
I got a letter the other day from a woman. She said, ‘I don’t want government-run health care. I don’t want socialized medicine. And don’t touch my Medicare.’ I wanted to say, you know, that’s what Medicare is: a government-run health care plan that people are very happy with.
I would rather face a death panel than ally myself with the naysayers on health-care reform. But there is a method in the madness of the ‘Medicare isn’t a government plan’ argument. Medicare may be run by the government (through the Health Care Financing Administration), but it is funded, as is Social Security, by payroll taxes.
Like Social Security, Medicare is viewed by its beneficiaries as ‘getting my own money back.’ It’s a fallacy, of course; there is no ‘lockbox.’ But this view partakes of the Calvinist view that there are deserving and undeserving recipients of government payments, the ‘deserving poor’ and the welfare bums.
In the health-care context, ‘government program’ means not only that the government funds and operates health care, but that it dispenses benefits to the unmotivated and the lazy. Cue another town-hall theme: that health-care reform designed to cover the uninsured will result in scrimping on Medicare. So the naysayers may be wrong, but they aren’t incoherent.
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