Democrat Kathy Hochul’s surprising victory Wednesday in a special election in a heavily Republican congressional district in upstate New York turned mainly on the victor’s opposition to the Republican House plan to slash and privatize Medicare. Now, national Democratic leaders seem to believe Hochul’s campaign paves a path for 2012 to win back some of the seats they lost in the last election. But as bad as the House plan is, Democrats would do themselves, and the nation, a disservice to use that election as a model for trying to turn the tables on Republicans in the 2012 elections.
The Republicans’ slash-and-burn plan, sponsored by House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan and passed enthusiastically by the overwhelming Republican majority in the House, isn’t the right medicine to cure what ails Medicare. But Medicare clearly needs an overhaul.
Under current estimates, the program’s $544 billion annual cost will rise by 80 percent by 2019; that’s unaffordable, and reforms must be made. But it will take a bipartisan approach to fix it. That can’t happen without both sides agreeing to quit demonizing the other over proposals to change the health care system.
A poisoned well
That hardly sounds possible at the moment, of course. The grenades lobbed by Republicans against health care reform and rational Medicare improvements over the past two years have virtually poisoned the well for a nonpartisan discussion of the myriad details of health care reform generally, and Medicare specifically.