The perils of old age
Wednesday, July 29 2009
Yesterday President Obama hosted a call-in town hall for seniors to ask questions about health care reform; this, from the New York Times:
To illustrate what he said were misunderstandings surrounding health reform, Mr. Obama quoted from a letter he received recently from an elderly woman: “I don’t want government-run health care,” she wrote. “I don’t want socialized medicine, and don’t touch my Medicare.”
What the Times article doesn’t explain is that, of course, Medicare is in fact government-run health care. This dear woman was deeply confused. And who can blame her?
No doubt many senior citizens are also confused – but it’s not a symptom of their age. Rather, it’s because they represent a powerful constituency with a clear interest in the debate. So the right-wing is throwing a lot of misinformation at old folks, hoping some of it will stick. There’s this, from Betsy McCaughey in the Wall Street Journal: “legislation now being rushed through Congress… will reduce access to care, pressure the elderly to end their lives prematurely, and doom baby boomers to painful later years.” Then there’s this email going around, which Trish Torrey debunked, that calls health care reform a “senior death warrant”. And even Republican members of Congress have gotten in on the act, claiming that “seniors will be put to death” under the House bill. All of intended to scare the bejeesus out of older folks, in hopes they will mobilize to shut down health reform.
But the main vehicle for mobilization of the elderly is the American Association of Retired Persons – and here’s the rub: the AARP is open to membership from people 50 and older. Because they’re ineligible for Medicare, people aged 50-64 are pretty vulnerable in our health care system – the AARP even has a fact sheet explaining why. The AARP isn’t going to mobilize against a plan that speaks to a severe need for a significant chunk of its membership.
So all this scaremongering amounts to… not much. And the fact that it isn’t working might suggest the extent to which the scaremongers are detached from the realities of health care in this country.
