Jonathan Cohn had some fun this afternoon with this tweet and article:
@CitizenCohn Huge scoop: White House endorses means-testing for Medicare. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112506/david-brooks-obama-and-medicare …
-- the joke being that Obama's 2013 budget, released a year ago, proposed modest increases in the already-higher premiums that wealthy seniors pay for Medicare Parts B and D. Legions apparently retweeted Cohn without pausing to note that the "scoop" was a year old and based on information that the White House publicized.
Cohn's post was prompted by David Brooks lambasting Obama for not offering serious entitlement cuts, such as means-testing, in current negotiations to replace the sequester (see Cohn's post for links). Which highlights a rather odd fact: means-testing Medicare and Social Security has been a Republican talking point throughout the budget wars. They use it either, I imagine, for cover -- see, we're not just about cutting benefits for the poor -- or as a stalking horse for cutting benefits for everyone else. More on that later.
The funny thing about means-testing is that it's functionally equivalent (if arguably less efficient in some cases) to raising taxes on the wealthy, which is anathema to the GOP. Another funny thing: people don't realize the extent to which benefits for the elderly are already means-tested -- or, if I'm using that term imprecisely, more expensive for the wealthy (and in one case, available only to the poor). A few facts, then, about our core elderly benefits:
