Obama’s Inaugural Hard Line on Medicare/Medicaid
Inauguration Day in Washington is a blessedly nonpartisan event celebrating our messy yet peaceful democracy with great pomp. But President Obama, with renewed certainty, drew a hard line in his inaugural address against entitlement cuts that could fundamentally change Medicare and Medicaid. And in doing so he doubled down with Republicans in the next rounds of the deficit reduction cagematch.
“We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit. But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future,” the President said. With a slap at Mitt Romney’s “47%” comments, Obama asserted that our entitlement programs “strengthen us” and “do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.”
Obama has said he’s willing to make “modest” changes to Medicare to keep it solvent in the long term, but he wants to do so by “bending the curve” on costs, not by major structural reforms. In repeating these lines he’s acknowledging what he owes to core constituencies in his own party, and flushing the ideas of an eligibility age increase or a serious look at premium support. Republicans want big structural changes to Medicare, and point out that their ideas did better with voters in the election than a lot of Democrats thought they would. But that doesn’t mean they’ll get what they want from a President who has clearly concluded that these folks on the Hill won’t be any help. Like, ever.
Obama reminded the inaugural audience that the Affordable Care Act was intended to be a crown jewel of the America’s safety net. “Together, we resolved that a great nation must care for the vulnerable, and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune,” Obama said. Red meat for the left — and a warning to the GOP. The President’s got his swaggah back.
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