The balsa wood glider equivalent of private health insurance

Two stories in this morning’s New York Times refer to the Republican plan to kill Medicare as an “overhaul.”

The first one puts it in the headline.

G.O.P. Rethining Bid to Overhaul Medicare Rules.

The secondone does it in the second graph of the story:

Only weeks ago, top Democrats appeared to have all but written off a special election for a Congressional seat in the suburbs of Buffalo. After all, Republican voters vastly outnumber Democrats in the district, and the Republican candidate, Jane L. Corwin, a well-liked state assemblywoman, seemed to be a shoo-in.

Then along came Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin. Mr. Ryan, a top House Republican, released a plan calling for the most extensive overhaul of Medicare since it was created.

Both these stories contain the same qualified good news.  Voters are catching on to the fact the Republican Party is out to get them.  When he released his budget plan, Paul Ryan was hailed by DC insiders as “courageous” and “serious.”  He was praised for having started a discussion that “needed” to be held.  It turns out that what people have been discussing is how mean, cruel, selfish, and destructive the Republican plans for the country are.  The “courageous” Ryan has had to twist himself into knots at Town Hall meetings in his own up till now very safe district to find creative ways to tell angry voters that his plan doesn’t do what it obviously does. The Republican leadership is looking for a graceful way to back away from a budget plan they’ve already passed.

But the retreat is strategic.  They’ll regroup.  Maybe it won’t happen before the next election, but they’ll be back as soon as they think it’s politically safe with a new plan to cut the safety net to ribbons.

This has been the Party’s reason for being since 1934!  It’s been what they’ve been working on doing since they took control of the federal government in 1994.  They want to end the Welfare State because they know that the only way the nation can afford it is if the rich and the multi-billion dollar corporations pay their fair share of taxes and they don’t want the rich or the corporations paying any taxes.

This, by the way, is right there in the GOP budget plan which shifts more of the tax burden off the corporate rich and onto the middle class.

My question here, though, is, Why do the New York Times and other Media outlets insist on calling the Republicans’ plan to end Medicare anything but a plan to end Medicare?

“Overhaul, Gracie?”

Look, Media, the GOP's stated goal is to phase out Medicare.  It’s right there in the plan. The path to this is privatization via vouchers. That's not an "overhaul."

If they had a plan to replace all our fighter jets with balsa wood gliders would you say they wanted to “overhaul” our fighter jet program?

Essentially, they want to replace Medicare with the private insurance equivalent of balsa wood gliders.  That is, they want to end it and replace it with nothing like Medicare!

It’s a cheap and flimsy plan that won’t carry any weight or fly either long or far and they don’t mean it to.  It’s designed to crash, just not until five elections from now.

Why is that so hard for you to report that they want to do what they flat out say they want to do?

Comments

[actor212]

Guess what, Lance?

They also want to ram it down our throats!

[Linkmeister]

Because that would require taking a view different from the "objective" one they claim to strive for.

[Sherri]

Because newspapers, being corporate owned for the most part these days, are in the business of comforting the comforted and afflicting the afflicted now? The interests of the owners of the papers are more aligned with the Republicans than with the Democrats.

[Sue]

It appears Ms. Corwin has another Wisconsin connection besides Paul Ryan: the person who put together this helpful website is the same guy who prank-called Scott Walker.
http://www.janecorwin.org/

[Bruce]

The fact that the Republican plan is an atrocity and that the Republicans want to endanger countless lives in the name of tax cuts cannot be admitted, because to do so would be to bring into view, like some prehistoric horror emerging from the mists, what no "respectable" reporter can say, or even allow themselves to consider.

That the Republican party is now a positive threat to the Republic and must at the least be razed to the foundations before it can be salvaged.

For this is admission that the System has broken down.

And the notion that the System they are so firmly embedded in is fundamentally _broken_ is to them like unto the death of God.

[Charlie]

With all do respect to your "the republicans are out to get us narrative", Obama is giving the conservaqtives everything they want ...everything he was paid to give them and all the while the democrats will take the blame. All we have left of democracy in America is two wings of the corporate party and neither represent the majority of Americans.

[RepubAnon]

Funny, my thesaurus doesn't list "overhaul" as a synonym for "eviscerate" - maybe the New York Times has a better edition than mine? Why else would they call Mr. Ryan's proposal as "overhauling" Medicare rather than eviscerating it?

Another question: shouldn't folks working at newspapers care more about threats to the safety net? They may need it soon...