How Sequestration Savages People on Medicare

Tacoma woman, 2011: recording the strength of character and depth of feeling so magnificently evident in her face was its own reward as, at the time, I had no other reason to make her portrait. Pentax MX, 135mm f/2.5 Takumar, Fujucolor 800 (desaturated). Though these bayonet-mount Takumars are frequently damned for having low-end, inferior glass, I have to differ: this was wide open at 1/125th of a second.  (I bought the Takumar after the retirement of the last  Leica-trained repair person in the United States forced me to sell my beloved M cameras and make Pentax my sole 35mm system.)  Photograph by Loren Bliss,  copyright 2013.  

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ANOTHER EXPOSÉ DETAILING how sequestration threatens lower-income people with death by abandonment and neglect – the One Percent's favorite 21st Century modality of genocide – surfaced last Friday via Medicare Watch, the on-line weekly of the watchdog Medicare Rights Center.

 

The MW report summarizes detailed analyses from two unimpeachable sources, the National Council on Aging and the federal Office of Management and Budget. It itemizes $292 million the sequester is gouging from Medicare funding, and describes how “(t)hese devastating cuts will no doubt have a major impact on the economic security of middle- and low-income Medicare beneficiaries, who will have to spend more out–of-pocket on basic necessities, thus making it more difficult to afford health care.”

 

“Half of all people with Medicare,” the report continues, “live on annual incomes of $22,000 or less and spend one-third of their household incomes on health care costs. Due to sequestration, already overburdened seniors will need to make difficult choices, such as whether to pay their heating bills or fill their prescriptions.”

 

MW also provides convenient links to the original documents.

 

The underlying premise, based on MRC's 24 years as a primary advocacy group for Medicare beneficiaries, is that all cuts in government payments to hospitals, insurance companies, pharmaceutical firms, doctors and other Medicare providers will be passed onto patients as increased costs or reduced services. Even if such trickle-down measures are presumably illegal, the lawyers who serve the insurers and other such health-care profiteers invariably find loopholes by which to maintain their margins.

 

Supported as it is by the historical record, this conclusion adds yet another credible rebuttal  to the Obama Administration's increasingly unbelievable claim the much larger cuts to Medicare provider payments already imposed by the Affordable Care Act will somehow not increase the already burdensome medical bills paid by elderly and disabled people.

 

Hence there's a growing fear – and not just amongst seniors – an ugly post-electoral surprise is lurking in Obamacare. Skeptics are already damning it as another example of “change we can believe in”: the absolute certainty that life in the United States – at least for the 99 Percent – will get much, much worse.

 

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EDITORIAL NOTE: here's my explanatory response to a couple of colleagues who thought I buried my lead in “How Sequester's Sword Slashes Vital Programs for Lower Income People,” one of two stories that ran last week under the “Economics Below the Salt” headline.

 

If this were a local-news blog – if the majority of its readership were local instead of national and international – the two critics would be right. But readers who are unfamiliar with the intricacies of U.S. governance need background information if they are to understand the sequester's magnitude – why it could prove to be the most maliciously deadly atrocity in the nation's political history.

 

It is also the most diabolically clever political ploy I have yet encountered, an unabashedly vicious bit of legislative sleight-of-hand by which both parties give the One Percent the budget cuts they demand while simultaneously worming out from under responsibility for the ruin so inflicted.

 

(Yes, I believe sequestration is permanent – why the present Republican/Democrat infighting is merely another Big Lie to conceal the grim reality we are governed by One Party of Two Names, a political machine that serves only the One Percent, the rest of us be damned.)

 

In any case, rather than begin the sequester story with quotes from Tacoma Housing Authority Executive Director Michael Mirra, as I would have done had I been writing only for locals, I prefaced his remarks with many details that were presumably familiar to readers in the U.S. but possibly unknown to those elsewhere.

 

I took this route not just to facilitate maximum comprehension, but to contribute my own tiny part in what – if there is any justice left in this world – will surely become a global journalistic campaign to inflict maximum embarrassment on the treacherous and cowardly politicians who perpetrated the potentially murderous fraud of sequestration.

 

Which, of course, assumes such conscienceless politicians can still be mortified – that they have not given themselves completely over to the moral imbecility advocated by Ayn Rand in her capitalist sequels to Nazism's Mein Kampf. Obviously we shall see.

 

LB/12 March 2013

 

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