Over the past few months, many Kossacks have expressed dismay and found it to be inconceivable that a Democratic President would consider cuts or adjustments of any kind to the big three: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Comments like this one, from today, sum up the sentiment:
I dissent. I can not BELIEVE what I am seeing posted here. A de facto celebration of the fact that the FIRST president to effectively cut Social Security and Medicare is a DEMOCRAT. We ought to hang our heads in SHAME!
Setting aside the fact, that nothing has been agreed to yet, because everything has not been agreed to yet, is it true that it's inconceivable that a Democrat would ever consider such a thing?
Former President Bill Clinton, "still widely considered one of his party’s foremost politicians," according to the New York Times, said the recent Democratic win in NY-26 (widely attributed to revulsion for the Republican plan to voucherize Medicare), was not an endorsement for Democrats to leave Medicare as it is:
"You shouldn’t draw the conclusion that the New York race means that nobody can do anything to slow the rate of Medicare costs. I just don’t agree with that,” Mr. Clinton said at a budget forum sponsored by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. Instead, he said, “you should draw the conclusion that the people made a judgment that the proposal in the Republican budget is not the right one. I agree with that.”
But Mr. Clinton said he feared that Democrats would conclude “that we shouldn’t do anything.”
“I completely disagree with that,” he said. “I think there are a lot of things we can do to bring down Medicare costs....
Mr. Clinton, with some passion, returned to the topic at the end of an hour-long interview. “I think the Democrats are going to have to be willing to give up, maybe, some short-term political gain by whipping up fears on some of these things — if it’s a reasonable Social Security proposal, a reasonable Medicare proposal. We’ve got to deal with these things. You cannot have health care devour the economy.”
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/...
An argument could be made that Bill Clinton is not a true Democrat. He is a DLC centrist that never had the true blue Democratic convictions of an Al Gore or Howard Dean or even his wife, Hillary.
One wonders, if a President Gore were facing the same rising costs and calls to do something about rising costs what would he do differently from President Obama?
Evidence suggests that President Gore would defend cutting the rising costs in Medicare:
Consider this exchange in the veep debate:
Jack Kemp: "The president himself suggested that the reduction in the growth of Medicare over the next five or six years ought to be held to 6 percent. Under the Republican plan, irrespective of the numbers, it will grow at 7 or even more percent."
Al Gore: "I think Mr. Kemp has unintentionally made a mistake in saying that President Clinton called for a reduction to 6 percent. ... It is not the president's position."
Nobody bothered to check out this one. But the fact is that in 1993 Clinton boasted he could cut Medicare growth to 6 percent while protecting the program.
Here's Clinton speaking to the American Association of Retired Persons in October that year: "Today, Medicaid and Medicare are going up at three times the rate of inflation. We propose to let it go up at two times the rate of inflation." Given that prices were expected to climb 3 percent a year, Clinton meant 6 percent growth for Medicare.
"That is not a Medicare or Medicaid cut," he reassured seniors. "So when you hear all this business about cuts, let me caution you that that is not what is going on. We are going to have increases in Medicare and Medicaid, and a reduction in the rate of growth."
Far from devastating, this slowdown was, the White House said at the time, good for seniors.
Ira Magaziner told a press briefing that "slowing the rate of growth actually benefits beneficiaries considerably because it slows the rate of growth of the premiums they have to pay."
But looked at in the terms the White House uses today, Clinton was proposing cuts in Medicare spending beyond the $270 billion Republicans dared propose.
Clinton/Gore eventually cut Medicare growth in 1997 and received the support of prominent Democrats:
What I did support is cutting the growth rate in Medicare, which Bill Clinton ev--eventually signed in 1997. That did have some Democratic support, people like Senator Bob Kerry at the time. And in fact, what we did saved Medicare.
http://www.factcheck.org/...
That's Howard Dean on the Today show defending himself in response to attack ads by Richard Gephardt that claimed “Did you know he (Dean) supported the Republican plan to cut Medicare by $270 billion?”
Wait, what? Howard Dean supported a Republican plan? It doesn't matter what kind of plan it was. Howard Dean supported a Republican plan?
Politifact explains:
...back in 1995...Dean spoke favorably of a plan being proposed by Republican senators to slow the growth of spending in Medicare by $270 billion over seven years. And as we’ve said before, if that’s a “cut” then Gephardt and President Clinton were proposing a cut, too: a measure to slow Medicare spending by $124 billion.
So we have Clinton, Gore, Gephardt and Dean all proposing making adjustments to Medicare?
Inconceivable!
Well Medicare is just one of the Big Three. Surely neither Bill Clinton nor Howard Dean would have the audacity to tinker with the crown jewel of the New Deal, Social Security.
That would be inconceivable.
Bill Clinton, Who's Known for His Plan to Cut Social Security
In an article reporting on how the Republicans are backing away from the Ryan plan for privatizing Medicare. the NYT quoted former President Bill Clinton on the need to cut Medicare spending. Mr. Clinton was speaking a daylong conference of the deficit sponsored by Wall Street investment banker Peter Peterson.
It would have been worth reminding readers that Clinton is a big proponent of cuts to Social Security. At the deficit conference that Peterson sponsored last year, Clinton boasted that he had wanted to cut Social Security but congressional leaders from both parties blocked him. The cuts that he wanted would have reduced benefits by approximately 1 percent a year. This means that retirees in their 70s, 80s, or 90s, would be getting almost 15 percent less in Social Security benefits today, if President Clinton had gotten his way.
But again, that's Bill Clinton.
He's not a true, blue, dyed-in-the-wool Democrat like Howard Dean. It would be inconceivable for Howard Dean to suggest altering Social Security, right?:
Back in 1995, Dean did suggest increasing the Social Security retirement age to 70, and also that the program itself shouldn't be exempt from the effort to trim the federal deficit. For example, he said in an ABC News interview:
Dean: I also think that we ought to put Social Security back on the table and defense. If you take defense and Social Security off the table, what you've essentially said, "We're not going to cut any of the controversial things at the federal level, despite our rhetoric about being courageous in a new day in the American Congress, we're just going to let the governors do all the cutting." We'll do the cutting, but they got to do some cutting here, too.
http://www.factcheck.org/...
You're telling me that a Democrat--and not just any Democrat--but the former Chairman of the Democratic National Committee in charge of recruiting Democrats who support Democratic values, actually proposed "putting everything on the table" including Social Security?
That's inconceivable that a progressive like Howard Dean would utter such a thing.
Because I recall reading on these very pages in a high-recced diary about the White House being surprised by Boehner, this:
If spending cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are still on the table, then this is unacceptable for this progressive Democrat. I do not thank the President for putting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid on the chopping block. You can't put that genie back in the bottle once it's out.
Well Bill Clinton, Howard Dean and Richard Gephardt and others let that genie out in the 90s.
So it turns out that President Obama is not the first Democrat to propose that everything should be on the table, which seems inconceivable, given what's been written at Daily Kos ever since the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission was formed in 2010.
So is there any Democrat out there from that era that wasn't tainted by the compulsion to deal with these infallible, never-to-be-adjusted, programs?
Hillary are you out there?
Hillary Rodham Clinton told a Senate panel in 1993 that savings in Medicare were easy because "we have too many examples now of how it can be done better at lower costs with the same or better quality, and that's what we're counting on."
http://www.slate.com/...
Inconceivable!
Vizzini: Inconceivable!
Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.