The Return of the Welfare Queen and Open Class Warfare

Michael Steele invoked class warfare in his fear mongering attempt to turn seniors against the working poor who can't afford health care by claiming the seniors will lose Medicare benefits if health care goes to the uninsured. This guy is as dishonest as anyone in the Republican Party.

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The healthcare reform debate took a rather remarkable turn last week when the Washington Post published an Op-Ed piece by Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele telling retirees that his party would fight any effort to modify the benefits they derived from the government-run Medicare program in order to offer similar benefits to others. The Op-Ed was immediately supplemented by an item on the RNC Web page trumpeting a "Seniors' Health Care Bill of Rights," similarly pledging the GOP to a to-the-death defense of Medicare benefits and procedures, allegedly under dire threat from universal health coverage.Steele's gambit mainly got attention because it was laughably in conflict with nearly a half century of Republican attacks on Medicare, and because he adopted every ludicrous made-up claim about the impact of this or that health reform bill on Medicare. In a disastrous NPR interview later in the week, the GOP chieftain had a predictably difficult time explaining why the GOP wanted to "protect" Medicare because it was so bad a program that it couldn't withstand any "raids."

[..]This should be familiar to any political observer over the age of 30 as a new version of the old "welfare wedge": the emotionally powerful conservative argument that Democrats want to use Big Government to take away the good things of life from people who have earned them and give them to people who haven't.

[..]What's most interesting, and dangerous, about the new "welfare wedge" is that it's not about poor people who don't work for a living. After all, most very poor families often already have health insurance (depending on where they live) via Medicaid, and those who don't work these days generally don't have the option of working. The target of "welfare" shouters seems to be the working poor, or middle-class minority families who are struggling to stay in the middle class.

via The return of the welfare queen | Salon.

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