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As Scott, chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, writes in his “11-Point Plan to Rescue America,” “If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again.” That means if our notoriously gridlocked Congress couldn’t agree on the terms of what Social Security and Medicare should look like every five years, those programs would end.
those programs would end
those programs would end
those programs would end
those programs would end
For decades, Republicans have been saying they are coming for these programs, two of the Democratic Party’s proudest achievements.
In fact, many Republicans actively campaigned against Medicare. George H.W. Bush, who was running for U.S. Senate in 1964, called Medicare “socialized medicine.” A few years before that, Ronald Reagan had claimed that Medicare would lead to Americans “telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”
In the recent political era, however, the GOP hasn’t just spoken negatively about the programs, but used their power to try to undermine them. In 1994, when Republicans, led by Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia, took control of the House for the first time in 40 years, one of their top priorities was gutting Medicare. And the next year, with Republicans in control of the House and the Senate, they voted to cut $270 billion in Medicare funding to finance a tax cut that would primarily benefit upper income taxpayers. Experts said the budget cut would push 500,000 seniors into poverty, and President Bill Clinton, who vetoed the measure, accused the Republicans of trying to “eviscerate the health system for our older Americans."
After Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, then-Speaker of the House GOP Rep. Paul Ryan re-upped his plan to change Medicare into something unrecognizable. Instead of Medicare guaranteeing coverage to those over 65 years of age, Ryan wanted to create in essence a “voucher” program where Americans would have subsidies to buy private health insurance. The result would have been the shrinking of Medicare and seniors covering more of their medical bills. In response, the head of AARP slammed Ryan’s proposal as “a clear downgrade of the Medicare benefits people have earned throughout their working lives,” adding that “seniors will be asked to bear more risk at greater personal cost.”
During his 2016 campaign, Trump promised not to cut Medicare, but the 2020 budget he proposed called for an approximately $800 billion dollar cut over 10 years. That didn’t happen because Democrats controlled the House, but Trump’s budget was another example of the GOP signaling to the country that, if given the chance, they will gut or even end guaranteed health care for more than 60 million seniors.
in 2005, President George W. Bush attempted to essentially privatize Social Security, claiming that it was in a “crisis” and that it needed significant reforms to avoid “bankruptcy.” Despite Republicans in Congress being on board, the public overwhelmingly rejected Bush’s proposal. As Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall has said, Bush’s plan “was taking something that was working and making it something that was very risky, inherently risky and could have very negative consequences for individual people.”
The GOP’s efforts to end Social Security and Medicare
