James Surowiecki writes this week about the defection of senior citizens/retirees from Democrats in the midterms.
The impact of that [21-point] swing was magnified by the fact that seniors, always pretty reliable midterm voters, were particularly fired up: nearly a quarter of the votes cast were from people over sixty-five. The election has been termed the “revolt of the middle class.” But it might more accurately be called the revolt of the retired.
What happened was health care reform which many retirees didn't like. The reform bill was widely popular, but not with seniors.
While the Affordable Care Act was being debated, most seniors opposed it, and even after the law was passed Gallup found that sixty per cent of them thought it was bad. You sometimes hear (generally from Republicans) that the health-care bill is wildly unpopular. The truth is that, in every age group but one—seniors—a plurality of voters want to keep the bill intact.
So okay, some of it was "death panels" and other Foxed-up scare stuff, mostly about how Medicare would be cut to pay for the inclusion of whole new groups of insured. Wrong. Badly and sadly wrong.
When Surowiecki gets right down to it, senior citizens l0ok like selfish jerks. I get a little defensive about that because of course there were plenty of Democrats over the age of 65 who were very supportive of health care reform, whose only criticism was that Congress didn't go straight through to a single-payer plan, and who voted Democratic in the midterm election. Those who turned against the reform bill did so because they were consistently (and deliberately) misinformed, because some were indeed "greedy [and selfish] geezers," and because of the economic uncertainty.
It won’t actually cut current spending, as Republicans claimed in campaign ads, but between now and 2019 total Medicare outlays will be half a trillion dollars less than previously projected. Never mind that this number includes cost savings from more efficient care, or that the bill has a host of provisions that benefit seniors—most notably the closing of the infamous drug-benefit “doughnut hole,” which had left people responsible for thousands of dollars in prescription-drug costs. The idea that the government might try to restrain Medicare spending was enough to turn seniors against the bill.
...The very people who currently enjoy the benefits of a subsidized, government-run insurance system are intent on keeping others from getting the same treatment. ...The subsidies that seniors get aren’t fundamentally different from the ones that the Affordable Care Act will offer some thirty million Americans who don’t have insurance. Opposing the new law while reaping the benefits of Medicare is essentially saying, “I’ve got mine—good luck getting yours.”
Of course, the recession played a major role. Many worry that their already slim piece of the pie will get even slimmer if their neighbors get help. In fact, the "greedy geezers," as Surowiecki points out, are no worse nor more incomprehensible than "other voters [who] don’t want to pay for any more stimulus spending, even if millions of Americans are unemployed."
Obama's failure explain and clarify the details of health care reform did nothing to insure acceptance of the legislation. That made it easier for the right to fill in the gap with outright lies about the bill. In the end, though the loss of the retiree vote was as much about the recession as anything else.
... The Obama Administration didn’t pitch health-care reform as well as it might have: its emphasis on the way the bill would “bend the cost curve” was heard by seniors as “slash Medicare.” But the Democrats’ loss of support among the elderly was more a matter of economic fundamentals than of political framing. If the economy were growing briskly, it’s unlikely that the health-care bill would have become so politically toxic. And, with Republicans now looking to roll back parts of the bill, what happens to health care in the long term may depend a lot on what happens to the economy in the short term.
