-By Frank Hyland
You take your car to the local auto dealership because it just isn’t running right, like it used to run. For the third time, you tell the Service Manager what the symptoms are and what you think the cause is. You’ve had this car for two and a half years, and plenty of other cars before this one, so you’re a pretty good judge of how an auto should operate. Your gas mileage is declining, there’s a persistent odor as you drive, ominous-sounding noises have crept in and are now getting louder and louder, neither the brake nor the accelerator pedal seems responsive. You return to the dealership, pay them, and drive away. Right away you notice that it is still sluggish and still smells, and the noises you reported yesterday are even louder.
Will you return to that dealership again? Will you give them more of your money in return for what they claim is the best service around? Will you accept their word that they “guarantee” their work? They’ve sent you back out into traffic in a vehicle that doesn’t run well and that has problems in both stopping and accelerating. It’s very likely that you won’t return to them. Even if they were the only dealership in your town, you would find a way to get the car to the nearest town with another dealership, one that doesn’t ignore you or make you false promises on which it cannot and/or will not deliver.
In the past two weeks most of you have seen on TV a commercial in which a young man, said to resemble Cong. Paul Ryan, wheels an elderly woman in a wheelchair to the edge of a cliff and then appears to throw her over the cliff’s edge. The video’s message is that this is what Republicans plan to do with the Medicare program. The commercial was produced by The Agenda Project (http://agendaproject.org). Just like the auto dealership that lied to you repeatedly while taking your money, the commercial distorts the Ryan plan completely. Unless the “elderly” woman in the wheelchair is actually 23 years old now, or 49, or 54 and prematurely gray, she is not affected in the least and never will be.
Those of you who will be affected because you are now under the age of 55 have a clear choice. Well actually you don’t. Those who designed Medicare and who have “administered” it have sealed your fate. You can continue to do nothing aside from returning to the same “dealership” (Medicare) over and over by paying your premiums and voting into office those who tell you that everything is fine. If you do that, though, you will simultaneously be making the other choice – because Medicare, depending on whose estimate you believe, will be bankrupt in about 13 years or less. If your doctor has told you that you have 12 years or less to live, you’re fine.
Just as you won’t ever go back to the lying, thieving auto dealership, if you’re operating on more than four functioning brain cells, you won’t keep believing in the “Medicare Fairy” — a close relative of the Tooth Fairy. Don’t like the Ryan plan? Fine. Alternatives abound. There needs to be an honest discussion and it needs to include you. If, however, you are older than 55 and you enter the discussion carrying a sign that reads, “Hands Off My Medicare,” you are dooming those 54 years old and younger – Your children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. If that doesn’t get through to you and make you feel bad, volunteer to be the next passenger in the wheelchair.
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Frank Hyland is a long-time Writer/Editor who has written for The New Media Alliance, and also for The Reality Check and has appeared weekly on Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Conservatism on Sunday evenings on Blog Talk Radio, along with Babe Huggett and Warner Todd Huston.