And who should pay ALOT more for that same share? The system is broken so lets fix it by letting the government dictate prices for those it pays for while letting the rest of us pay increased premiums to make up the difference?
Sooo....you want people with little income (because well, they're like 80 years old so probably aren't working anymore) to pay more at a time when they can least afford to due to something no human can control - aging? Ooookaaaayyy...
On point article about the GOP budget plans. What exactly does a compromise look like that the Republicans can agree too?
---------------------------------------------------------
The Morning Plum: The GOP’s self-defeating strategy in fiscal fight
Posted by Greg Sargent on March 15, 2013 at 9:20 am
For all the continued chatter this morning about the sincerity and limits of presidential schmoozing, the real reason for the fiscal impasse is hiding right there in plain sight, and it can be summed up in two sentences:
1) Obama can’t sell entitlement cuts to his base, or indeed Democrats in general, without Republicans agreeing to new revenues, and has offered them a straightforward compromise — one that would anger the base on both sides — based on the premise that total victory for the GOP is not an acceptable or realistic outcome.
2) Republican leaders can’t even begin to acknowledge that Obama has offered them a real compromise, because they can’t sell their base on the idea that the President is being flexible, let alone get them to seriously entertain accepting any compromise with him, because the base sees total victory over Obama as the only acceptable outcome.
In essence, a variety of political constraints prevent Republican leaders from acknowledging the reality of the situation. That makes any reality-based dialog impossible. The press has largely failed to reckon with this basic disconnect, which is why the discussion continues to spin its wheels around irrelevant questions, such as whether the president’s outreach is “sincere” enough, as if hurt feelings have anything at all to do with the stalemate, or whether Democrats have gone quite far enough with their offer to Republicans, when the latter won’t even say whether there’s any compromise they could accept.
In his meeting with Republican Senators, Obama reportedly presented them with a choice: They can accept a deal that includes Chained CPI for Social Security and means testing of Medicare in exchange for new revenues, or end up with no entitlement reform. Republicans continue to respond by claiming the President is being inflexible — by pretending he hasn’t offered them what he has offered — while refusing to say what could induce them to compromise.
Ultimately, though, the GOP’s reality-denying strategy is self defeating, and will make it harder for Republicans to agree to a way out of the impasse. In addition to refusing to acknowledge what Obama has offered on entitlements, Republican leaders also continue to refuse to acknowledge all the spending cuts ($1.5 trillion in 2011) Obama and Dems have already agreed to. This is partly because admitting to all of this would reveal the GOP’s own intransigence to the public with too much clarity. But there’s another reason for it, which is aptly spelled out by Steve Kornacki. John Boehner can’t admit to any of it for his own self-interested political reasons:
When it comes to Obama’s current quest for a grand bargain, there’s really nothing for Boehner to do but repeat the right’s familiar attacks on Obama for always wanting to raise taxes and never wanting to cut spending. Never mind, of course, that Obama has already signed off on $2.5 trillion in deficit reduction and is seeking $1.2 trillion more with his grand bargain crusade, and that most of that money is from spending cuts. Acknowledging that would destroy whatever credibility Boehner now has with the conservative base, and make it impossible for him to push any kind of deal through the House without being dethroned. So he bashes away, pretends the problem is Obama’s inflexible liberalism and waits. What the end-game is is unclear.
Keeping the base in the dark about the offer Obama has actually made and the spending cuts Obama has already agreed to will only make it harder to get conservatives to accept a deal later. Which is why it’s looking more and more like we’re stuck in a position where sequestration will drag on and on and we’ll lurch from one “continuing resolution” to the next and from one crisis (debt ceiling, anyone?) to another. Republicans will gamely claim the sequester is a “victory” for them, but in truth, being the party of austerity-only-and-forever and crisis-to-crisis governing is not a sustainable long term posture.
------------------------------------------------------------
