In an interview with the Washington Post, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi vowed Democrats will have a united front against any Republican plans to privatize Medicare.
“This is such a stark difference that people know we have to be unified,” Pelosi told the Washington Post.
In recent weeks, rumblings of privatizing Medicare have come back in force as Republicans wrestle with their priorities for the next two years and make a plan to carry out some of the items on their conservative wish list. One of those is privatizing Medicare.
In an interview with Fox News, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) – a long term advocate for plans to privatize Medicare– made it clear he would like to overhaul the program. Then, in an interview with reporters on Capitol Hill, Budget Chairman Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) said Republicans would change the program using budget reconciliation later this year.
But Pelosi told the Washington Post that she is optimistic Democrats can still fight against such changes. Pelosi compared the moment today to one Democrats faced in 2005 when Republicans tried to privatize Social Security as they had control of Congress and the White House.
“At that time, we committed to each other that we would be unified and disciplined,” Pelosi told the Washington Post. “Bush had just been elected. He gave us an opportunity by saying he would partially privatize Social Security. Everybody stuck together. The opportunity that we have now is the equivalent of the opportunity we had in ’05.”
Bad news is that every single Democrat can say no and it will still pass with huge margins with GOP in the House. In the Senate it will be close.
For interests sake I visited aarp.org to see what they had up about changes to Medicare and it is basically nothing other than a several days old article about working with the incoming administration that was probably copy and pasted from the last change of administration. If aarp doesn’t wake up they are going to wind up with a bunch of pissed off seniors that won’t want to renew their memberships.
Nancy.
Smash.
This is a fight Dems need to have, and need to win.
There’s a story on today’s NY Times about people who were okay with not voting this past election, and the quote that stuck with me is “They (politicians) never do anything for us anyway.”
This is something we have to do for us.
This is something we have to hang around the GOP’s neck for the midterms.
This is where we have to get folks on the ground, in those barbershops and neighborhoods, in those Rust Belt states, and say “This is what Democrats do for you.”
(Sorry - we as Dems need to get fired up over what we stand for - this couldn’t be a clearer example of that.)
Get your army out there and message the f$%# out of this in time for the holiday. This is your huge single issue everyone can understand and make drunk uncle Trump voter understand he just shot grandma.
I told this story elsewhere, but I was at the ophthalmologist’s office last week and most of his patients are older, like me, and I was settling up with his staff and we already had all established that we were all equally pissed off and disturbed about the election, so I pulled out my brand shiny new Medicare card and said - let’s use this as long as we can, since Paul Ryan has already said - 2017, Medicare is out of here. The glass window between where we were and the waiting room was open. You should have seen the heads shoot up from their reading material and look wildly in my direction like a herd of gnu who have just heard something roar.