What to do with Grandma When Her Medicare Voucher Runs Out

If you're a Boomer, you've most likely paid into it your entire working life and are counting on it to supplement the dwindling value of your projected retirement income.

If you are a Senior, you've paid into it your entire working life and are counting on it to survive as you struggle to supplement the dwindling value of your current retirement income.

So what will happen to mom, dad, grandma, and grandpa if Congressman Paul Ryan's Medicare voucher system finds acceptance on the Senate floor? I cannot spell it out any better than something a Senior friend wrote the other day. It appears, with permission, below:

I've met the enemy, and he is Paul Ryan, a Republican congressman from Wisconsin. I take his plan to destroy Medicare personally because it could destroy me personally.

If Ryan gets his way, I'll never be able to have Medicare pay any more medical expenses for me. And I haven't even started toward the nursing home yet, let alone the hospice.

As I understand it, under the Ryan plan, each disabled or senior citizen would be given a voucher worth $15,000 for medical care throughout their senior years. When the voucher is used up, NO MORE MEDICAL HELP! That would account for about one sophisticated test.

I have an excellent example. I have had two heart attacks but my numbers have become extraordinary. My cholesterol total is 95. My blood pressure runs about 100 to 110 over 60, and my pulse rate at rest is in the upper 50s. For heart care, I go to the Cleveland Clinic, regarded as the premiere heart care center in the world.

In November, Dr. Donald Underwood, a teacher of cardiologists at the clinic, decided that it was time for me to have some tests. I had what is called a nuclear predisone test, an echogram, and other tests to check on my heart. By and large, it was in pretty good shape.

In December and January, neuromuscular specialists at the clinic diagnosed a damaged ulnar nerve in my left arm that was causing muscle deterioration in my left hand.

Ultimately, Michael Steinmetz, a neurosurgeon, performed surgery on the nerve that, to me, was miraculous. I had zero pain after the surgery. Immediately following the operation, I began having feeling again in my left little finger. Some muscle seems to be returning to other parts of the hand.

For the heart and nerve diagnoses and treatments, Medicare paid the Cleveland Clinic more than $34,000 in a four-month span — more than twice the $15,000 lifetime cap envisioned under the Ryan plan.

Anyone who argues this plan is not the destruction of Medicare is nuts. And anyone who favors the plan would turn all of our senior citizens and disabled people into walking corpses. Yet, this incredible insult and deceit toward the American people passed the U.S. House of Representatives with all but four Republicans voting for it.

So, do you need ask me how I will vote in the forthcoming election for Congress?

No sir, no one should need to ask how to vote in the forthcoming election. It should be a no-brainer. The rich don't want to pay taxes, and when you've used up your 60-hour-no-vacation-work-weeks capacity, they surely don't want to pay for your dotage.

That working Americans could allow themselves to be snookered into hiding under their beds in irrational terror of non-existent healthcare reform Death Panels yet run to the community well to lap up Death Vouchers for themselves is beyond all reason.

But I don't see a lot of reason, or humanity, in the Republican party or their Tea Party off-shoot, which is why my entire family has left it behind.

Why I Would Be Shot at Dawn Before Ever, Ever Voting for Another Republican as Long as I Draw Breath

I recently read with interest, “Blind Unanimity,” by Eugene Robinson in a recent Washington Post. As usual, I agree wholeheartedly with his words. However, I humbly wish to add some additional thoughts on the subject of bipartisanship and a new mandate with new rules and new lexicons, i.e. we are dying out here.

See, I was born a Republican to a Republican household of working-class parents. I have a lengthy Republican lineage. My parents, socially moderate—even liberal on some issues—were hard-working, responsible fiscal conservatives who also supported the party of business, being wise enough to realize no one was ever hired by a poor man. Issues and politics were discussed around the dinner table regularly. I was made to face the inequities in our society.

My father loved Abraham Lincoln and told me all the time when I was a child how Lincoln freed the slaves. And I voted Republican in every election from my first until the day I saw George W. Bush swagger forth assuming to assume the presidency in 2000, at which time a little bell rang in my head and a little voice said in my ear, “Uh oh. Here comes trouble.” Turns out my mother at 80 heard the same little voice and switched parties as well after a lifetime of Republicanism.

In Robinson op-ed, the breaking of the air traffic controllers’ union was cited as an example of a union's misjudged reading of the new sherrif in town. If I had been paying attention then as I am now, that head-bell maybe first rang softly when Reagan swaggered forth. I just didn’t hear it because I was busy raising a young family and still trusting my government to keep the playing field fairly level.

But things haven’t been the same for the American worker since Reagan laid his hand on the Bible on the Capitol steps, have they? And having gotten away with unchecked anti-Federalism, unchecked anti-American-workerism, and outright train robbery about a million times since January 1981, the party of Lincoln is now a party a stinkin’. Their most cynical move to date being the installation of the seemingly witless Michael Steele as head of the GOP. Now there is a man who appears too brainlessly, egocentrically ambitious to know tokenism when it’s bestowed upon him. Is there a word that exceeds the meaning of offensive?

So, while the Republican Nero continues to twiddle and fiddle as the firestorm in the Republic burns ever hotter, we of the washed and unwashed, educated and uneducated alike really are dying out here. And the Republican party is not-, will not-, has no interest in- saving us. Ironic in that the mess is theirs. And contrary to popular belief, the back of slavery has not been permanently broken in America. Under Republicanism it has been vastly expanded--color notwithstanding. Republican enslavement of the working class has grown to become the man who must be removed from his apartment by crane.

My very own daughter is not allowed to drive through the executive parking lot at her work despite the fact that it is the only lot that is plowed and salted during this harsh Ohio winter. When she cannot make it up a grade to park in an unplowed, unsalted employee parking lot, she is . . . what? Going to lose her job, her child’s home, her meager insurance over it?

When she calls Wells Fargo to report that both she and her husband’s hours have been reduced at work but that she is the type who pays for the car she bought--Would they work with her? Modify the loan?—she is growled at that not only will the car be taken, she will be sued and her post-reduction wages garnished. Yes, it was a growl. I was listening. By all means, let’s give our friends on Wall Street more tax money.

How many examples of such treatment would you like to hear? I have dozens. Republicans and their party “ideologies” are a blight upon this land. They demoralize employees, stifling production while claiming to promote it. They are the general who yells, “There’s the battle boys! Let me know how it went.” They are no friend to the working man. They are no bedfellow to morality or common decency. So I would never expect the party of “family values” to go gently into that good night. Not when they’ve acquired their family values by ingesting entire families.

So, yes, I would choose being shot at dawn, walking the plank, or being tortured at Gitmo before I would ever, ever, ever vote for another Republican as long as I draw a breath. The party of Lincoln is a party a stinkin’. My dad must be rolling in his grave.

The Real Terrorist in Campaign '08

The "new" GOP giveth family and societal values with the one hand while doing everything they can during campaign season to tear them apart with the other. It's become far too sickening to stomach, and like the worst throwuppy virus, apparently we have now come to the part of the illness where the dry heaves make an appearance in the form of female, highlighted hair, high-heel jackbooted Sarah Palin.

John McCain, despite the fog of his apparent dotage, somehow got the memo mid-summer that the country was fed up to the gills with Republican shenanigans, and so he and his advisory band of GOP lobbyists and party hacks, in a desperate effort to continue Republican shenanigans, zeroed in on a candidate for vice president who could serve the campaign, after a little tweaking, as their own female (maybe the Hillary's will buy it) version of Joseph Goebbels. They found her all right. She'd just been waiting in the frozen north for her big moment. God said so. He said, "Sarah Palin."

And indeed they did find the perfect woman for the job--the one whose head was already empty enough to have sufficient room available for stuffing to the brim by neo-conservatives with Masters of the Universe talking points. The one whose beauty pageant looks and lithe figure, despite bearing five children she can't possibly have time to care for, would make Joe Sixpack go so immediately Ah-OOO-Gah that his ears would stop working. The one so naturally competitive and ambitious that she would say anything in front of anyone in order to keep her handlers happy and the spotlights pointed her direction.

At this moment, at this time in American history, her performance for the GOP has so far succeeded in making a mockery of all thinking women in politics, and for that matter all thinking women everywhere. That this fact escapes Ms. Palin is evidence of a shallow ability to reason critically. We already had a president like that. It didn't work out so well. And the alternative, that she should know she's being used and not care, would have far more frightening consequences should we find her in the Oval Office some day.

She is, right now, for the GOP, the hottie wind-up doll that is mum or absent during serious interviews with serious journalists but can be tightly wound and trotted out for propping up in front of a microphone at a campaign rally. There she can spew forth the very hatred that has already rent this nation asunder and prevented the serious problems that affect the nation's citizens and families from meeting up with their serious solutions.

To witness her stand before a GOP rally mic and accuse a well-vetted opposing candidate--a Harvard man no less--of being a homegrown terrorist, is to view Ms. Palin apparently acting out a live demonstration of her version of "country first." She spews her venom while her very own Downs syndrome baby is passed back and forth among family members sitting behind her like a ten-pound sack of potatoes, usually landing for care and feeding in the lap of a seven-year-old. I guess that is putting country first. It's just not a country I wish to live in.

Ms. Palin may have been originally hired to try to whip up a feminist frenzy. Failing that, she came in handy to whip up the "there's a terrorist among us you betcha" frenzy. But remove party from the argument for just a second and she still offends every hard-won sensibility it has taken me over half a century as a woman, wife, mother, and grandmother to accumulate.

"Country First" is only a campaign slogan, and apparently not a very good one unless one is only interested in identifying by the rally cries from the back of the Palin crowd, "Kill Obama, kill him!" those most mentally and emotionally feeble among us. Who's really inciting terror here? While Americans and America are in the deepest of trouble, the GOP is vying to get "GOP" added to Webster's Thesaurus under hypocrite.

That a President McCain could die in office and leave such a Christianista in charge of my country and the family I abandoned a career to care for, . . . that such a woman who shows up at campaign rallies at a time when only ideas will save us and detonates the destructive word bombs she wears strapped to her chest and clearly hard-wired to her heart . . . is a scenario too nightmarish to contemplate.

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***It should be noted that the Complicity Award for promoting this campaign of GOP terror goes to the mainstream media who appears to no longer be able to differentiate its collective hind end from a hole in the ground. The merriment of showing over and over and over in endless loop the rantings and ravings of a woman whose word bombs are the antithesis of everything she professes to stand for is a societal embarrassment from which it seems we may now never escape. God save us.

Magician McCain Pulls Sarah Palin Out of a Hat

America, as a nation, has not been able to regain its equilibrium since the Supreme Court installed George W. Bush as president in 2000, and since Bush then told Richard Clarke in early 2001 to go away and shut up about how al Queda was determined to attack the U.S. on its own soil using commercial planes. The disasters that ensued completed the political tailspin into which America was thrown and from which it has never recovered.

The actions and over-reactions of all three branches of government since 9/11 have left the nation deeply in debt; involved us in not one but two doubtfully winnable guerrilla wars (in which we must pay off the locals with borrowed tax dollars to make the claim "the surge worked"); and left our nation's citizens to fend for themselves against predatory lending practices, a failed housing and mortgage market, exorbitant healthcare costs or no healthcare at all, a lack of living-wage opportunities, empty municipal coffers, off-the-charts fuel prices, and an infrastructure that crumbles before their eyes.

The over-reactions of the Bush administration to their own failure to protect the nation and Congress's own failure to balance the intentions of the administration, have left American citizens flapping in the breeze to deal with it all and without the protectives afforded them by the Bill of Rights or the Constitution on which they could previously depend while boarding a plane, covering a convention, or expressing their opinions on their own telephones or computers.

So, the sudden advent of a Sarah Palin on the national political stage should serve as a hard slap across the face to thinking men and women everywhere in the U.S. Having cut her teeth a mere 12 years ago in both politics and civil management in a Wasilla, Alaska building that more resembles a lower-48 Dairy Queen than a city hall, Mrs. Palin was plucked from obscurity by the McCain campaign like a single crayon from a box of all reds, whites, and blues and thrust upon the national stage to serve as the shapely policy gams of the Republican party.

The press is all a-twitter at the new (hubba hubba) Republican smart-ass on the block. And yes, it takes one to know one. Smart-ass can come in handy, but it generally just adds to a problem rather than solves it. Like the magician who is never without the scantily dressed assistant on stage while the tricks are being performed, John McCain whose record speaks for itself, and many empty-walleted Americans were already pretty sure it wasn't speaking to them, has hired himself a good assistant.

Who wouldn't be flattered? The pay is great--akin to working Vegas. But still probably not a career move one wants published in the high-school-reunion newsletter. And while true that the assistant always comes to learn how the tricks are done, how many female magician headliners readily come to mind? Senator McCain is guilty of expedient use of a female. And Mrs. Palin is guilty of letting the sequins on her new costume blind her to it.

It has been said repeatedly that America now sits at a crossroads, and it appears for all practical intents and purposes to be the hard truth. America needs solutions to big, ugly problems if she is to right her economy, set all her people to constructive work, and find the political and practical equilibrium that once made and kept her great.

It was magic tricks that got America into this mess, but it is not magic that will get her out. And the last thing Lady Liberty needs right now is an assistant whose only experience is shooting and gutting the rabbit.

U.S. Passes Bad Paper Instead of Seeking Credit Counseling

If Republican MBA captains of industry are supposedly smarter than the average bear, a recent AP-Ipsos poll asking average Americans the way out of recession proves that average Republicans, as a pack, may not be the brightest bulbs in the socket. Only 18 percent of them believed that pulling out of Iraq, where the nation has spent, is spending, or has lost track of untold billions of public tax dollars, would staunch the financial bloodletting of American treasure and help our economy "a lot." Sixty-five percent of Democrats think ending the war will help.

Nineteen percent of overall respondents from both parties indicated they wouldn't even spend the money when the rubber checks begin arriving in May of this year. Forty-five percent said they’d use the money to pay bills. Congress and the president, clearly unaware of how the other half lives, do not seem to comprehend that average Americans were already long behind the eight ball on fuel, medicine, food, and mortgages when Washington concocted this fuzzy stimulus plan.

Granted, no high-falutin' economist is authoring this blog post, but isn't it a law of the universe--like gravity--that debt on top of debt only equals more debt? With rutted roads, rusty bridges, sub-standard schools, and cash-strapped state, county, and municipal governments staring our nation's citizens in the face daily, is it any wonder 43 percent said increasing government spending on health care, education and housing programs would help a great deal? Sixty-eight percent overall felt the money would be better spent at home.

Perhaps instituting jobs geared at solving this nation's burgeoning list of problems or funneling more money to local projects would contribute exponentially to the economy by creating and keeping steady jobs in the public sector. People are more likely to spend money regularly if they know they can count on having more of it next month.

Could there be a better investment of borrowed government funds than piling further debt onto national bankruptcy in order to dazzle citizens, who in fact will barely notice the refunds as a blip on their budgetary radars? Give a man a fish, he eats for one meal. Build a pond and hire the guy to open a fish farm, he'll eat forever and so will his community. Three-, six-, or twelve-hundred dollars doesn't keep someone who cannot support himself regularly off the streets for more than about 30 minutes at today's prices.

No doubt a CAT-scan peek into the collective brain power of Washington would reveal little, if any, activity occuring on a neurocellular level. When the citizenry, who is used to living within the constraints of budgetary and checkbook balances, displays more common sense regarding economic disaster aversion than the so-called finest economic minds, Houston: there is a big, BIG problem with America's leadership.

With the exception of those Republicans, the ones who clearly never tire of building someone else's nation at our expense (unless one day they notice their own surroundings have come to resemble a scene from The Day After), the AP-Ipsos poll demonstrates Americans are aware the place is lookin' a might shabby lately. Generally it doesn't seem they mind borrowing a bit to fix it up. But this stimulus package, the handing out of rubber government, one-use checks, will not result in any long-term or permanent improvements for America or Americans or stem the tide of an ever-increasing and exhorbitant debt that is dragging America rapidly backward.

Frankly, this brand of stimulus rather more resembles borrowing a dollar from a predatory uncle to help the homeless camped in the Wal-Mart parking lot. It doesn't change a thing for the homeless, and now you owe the uncle.

Stimulus Schmimulus

I’ve been following this “Stimulus Plan” coverage fairly closely, and I guffaw every time I hear it mentioned. President Goober is working with Congress to help out CorMerica . . . er, help out the stock market . . . er, help us all out of the mess the Admini-Congress has gotten us into.

Congress, which had all of 2007 to do something about the Alternative-Minimum tax problem, is now going to turn around and give me a check from the extra tax money they will take from me—check amount still undetermined while the players battle it out over which laughable sum will make me run to spend it—to save me, or someone, from a bad economy. Are these people for real, or did we experience an invasion of the mental snatchers one night in the greater D.C. metro area?

Congress, who hasn’t brought us a balanced budget for seven years or done anything to advance the concept of living within one’s means, have sat on their hands and allowed rampant negative government spending on a war only a few guys with GI Joe aspirations really wanted, then they enlisted the aid of, or looked the other way while the Saudis, the Chinese, and God knows who else, started buying up US assets at fire sale prices to prop up a sagging US dollar brought on by our borrowing jones.

Congress let mortgage brokers and lenders run rampant across the countryside raping the dreams and pillaging the limited resources of the ignorant masses, then watched initially mutely as corporate America, in conjunction with their media, pointed the finger at all the newly-minted poor homeless bastards and said, “This is you ignorant bastards’ fault because you wanted a house.”

Congress is the same band of privileged brothers and sisters who have allowed mega-corporations to feed at the tit of society and then helped them load the moving van for the islands so they can avoid any loyalties to the country from which they have gorged.

Now Congress and Alfred E. Newman are finally going to team to save me from failed economic policies and their dozy inaction, and I’m supposed to feel better now. They’re going to give me back $2.95 of my own money in the form of a rubber check drawn on the empty account of America’s Bank of Broke n’ Trust, and I’m supposed to be a good American and find a place to put it.

I will most likely have to use it at the grocery, the pharmacy, or the gas pump, which is a shame because it will prevent me from putting it where it really belongs.

The Unpolished State of the Union

The current state of the American union is one of a shiny red apple whose glossy outer appearance, the result of nature's handiwork up through the moment of ripening, belies a rotten inner core. America's treasure, the sap and pap of the apple, has been steadily siphoned off by the worm of corruption, leaving only the illusion of an intact fruit.

If the strength of a democratic nation can be measured by the hope its citizens possess for a peaceful and equitable future, then America quietly slid past its zenith sometime after 1980 whence began the current era of corporate baronies. American power has turned its eyes away from Main Street, where Americans live, to Wall Street, where corporate raiders reside.

The fate of America is not, and has never been, decided by those who are asked to execute it. For this reason, to whom much is given, much is required. Historically, this axiom has guided, more so than not, America’s leaders, generally the wealthiest among us. Were this axiom not generally followed, America could never have achieved its current level of modernity in a mere 200 years.

Specifically, sometime after 1980 the societal tenet of noblesse oblige, which had held America in good stead and advanced her as a people, followed a path of sorry and rapid reorder to the point where the sanctity of no religion, the sacrifice of no individual, the forfeit of no moral precept or founding document has become too great or too small to be surrendered on the altar of noblesse d'entitled.

In the citizenship vacuum left by the absence of noblesse oblige, non noble Americans try valiantly but often unsuccessfully to carry on and hold up the oblige on their own, the weight of which is staggering. Homes are lost, jobs displaced, healthcare for mind and body a hopeless, unaffordable tangle of jargon and inhumane rules. The playing field that once gave all Americans an equal chance to make ends meet, succeed, and even exceed now tilts crazily on its fulcrum, leaving the serfs charged with executing the plans of the noblesse running wildly from one end of the field to the other trying to find Level and a way to pay for it.

If the strength of a democratic nation is judged on the ability of its citizens to engage in productive employment and pay the bill both for the necessities and dreams of nation and citizen, then America's strength, like her citizens, is exhausted. The federal treasury has been emptied into the pockets of shadow appropriators, the resulting debt placed into the hands of nations whose loyalty can never be assured.

Those citizens who would willingly risk making the sacrifice of life in order to defend America have been driven to the breaking point of mind, body, and family, daily doing a dance of death while a noblesse Nero fiddles. Those citizens who wish simply to live in peace, care for family, and be productive in society are bombarded daily by those of greater resource who would legally and blatantly take advantage of them and then compel them to suffer the consequences of their own innocence.

Those citizens who would, to the furtherance of democracy, attempt to level the playing field by reporting on and speaking truth to power are ridiculed, spied upon, penalized, and even physically assaulted. Citizens who once fervently and reverently believed in the institution of democratic elections, have witnessed them become mere games of noblesse manipulation allowing only a limited number of voices to be heard and votes to be counted, and they have become disillusioned and mistrustful of the system.

The rules of societal fair play and the purity of one citizen-one vote are no longer overseen by a sovereign press which diligently and routinely sifts through campaign, governmental, and corporate muck to expose cheaters solely for the purpose of advancing democracy. And therein lies the source of rot at the core of the apple. The journalistic mirror into which America should ever be gazing has itself become corrupted and its transparency of purpose eliminated.

On January 28, the apple will once again be held aloft for the whole world to view. All witnesses will be shown that it still looks shiny and is still red. It will be polished and appear to look delicious. However, every non noble American watching the show may begin to feel a familiar and uneasy rumble in the pit of his stomach. The taste of bile may rise a bit in his throat because down deep in his soul, he knows the only part of the apple reserved for him is the worm.