CT Blue

It has been observed often, but always bears repeating, that the media in this country, whether consciously or unconsciously, sides with Republicans by adopting their terminology and the frames they put around issues. A good case in point is this article in this morning’s Times, about the special election in New York tomorrow.

Several times the reporter refers to the Republican’s plans to “revamp” Medicare. In this, he bows to the Republican insistence that their plan to replace Medicare with an entirely different program is not a plan to replace Medicare with an entirely different program. (I guess I should point out here that the reporter in question is Raymond Hernandez, and we in Connecticut know how anxious he is to carry Republican water.)

My American Heritage Dictionary defines revamp as follows:

To patch up or restore; renovate.

It is not accurate to say they are revamping Medicare. Keeping the name, and abolishing everything else is not a revamp. This is buying in to Republican spin. When the Yankees tore down Yankee Stadium, built a new stadium, and called the new stadium Yankee Stadium, they had not revamped the old Yankee Stadium. They tore it down, plain and simple, and that’s what the voucher system would do to what we now call Medicare.

There’s more buy-in to Republican spin in the article, since the reporter calls the Ryan plan a “deficit-cutting plan”, when, if we consult the facts, it is clear that it is not a deficit cutting plan, for it calls for using the “savings” realized by screwing the elderly to finance yet another tax cut for the rich, leaving us with the same projected deficit, and millions of elderly who won’t get decent medical care to boot. But in fact, there will be no savings to society, only to the federal government, for the elderly will still be getting medical care, and the money will come from somewhere. Medical costs are expected to soar, and whether through taxes or higher premiums, we in the lower 99% will end up paying, so our effective “taxes”, whether paid to the Feds or to Aetna, will go up. The Ryan plan is yet another Republican plan to transfer wealth to the top 1%, and it’s disingenuous to call it anything else.