How Is Cutting 196 Billion Dollars in Health Care Economic Stimulus?

Mother Davis cuts her aspirin pill in half as she painfully reflects on the blow:

The cruel con job that is the economic stimulus package of 2008 was revealed in full today, as the Bush Administration revealed its proposed federal budget for 2009. The Bush budget begins the process of cutting 196 billion dollars in Medicare health care benefits to elderly and desperately poor Americans.

How is cutting 196 billion dollars in health care to the Americans in most desperate need supposed to work as economic stimulus? That’s 196 billion dollars that will be ripped out of the nation’s economy.

And where will that money go? Into the pockets of the super-rich, and into the military occupation of Iraq. The Bush White House proposes the 196 billion dollar cuts as a way to pay for special tax breaks for extremely wealthy Americans, and as a way to find money to pay for the maintenance of the US military’s presence in Iraq.

If it weren’t for those tax breaks for the wealthy, and if it weren’t for the ongoing occupation of Iraq, there would be no need to cut that 196 billion dollars from Medicare.

So, as the old and the extremely poor go without health care, the economy of the middle class will suffer. You see, even though the government will no longer pay for as much health care for the old and the poor, the old and poor will continue to get sick. What will change is that they’ll delay medical care, so that when they do eventually go to the hospital, they will require more expensive medical care.

Someone’s going to pay for that care, and if it won’t be the federal government through Medicare, then it will be the American middle class, through increased health care costs put out by hospitals and doctors’ offices who feel the squeeze.

The wealthy will do just fine, with their special tax perks provided by the federal government. The military occupation of Iraq will continue, in spite of its ongoing inability to stop the savage violence in that country. The rest of us, however, will become poorer and sicker.

George W. Bush has the audacity to say that he’s providing us with economic stimulus? I don’t regard this as stimulating at all. On the contrary, it’s downright depressing.

Waiting for the Republican public relations pros to start calling her an “Advil Queen”,
Mother Davis