House GOP Votes to End Medicare While Lavishing Wealthy With $2.9 Trillion Tax Subsidy

As a jack-booted phalanx, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives Friday voted to abolish Medicare and lavish their wealthy cronies with $2.9 trillion in tax subsidies.  Paul Ryan's (R-WI) budget proposal to trim $4 trillion off federal spending sailed through the House on a party-line vote of 235-193. The roll call of infamy included all but four Republicans, and no Democrats. Of the four Republicans, three, Denny Rehberg (MT), Walter Jones (NC) and David McKinley (WV) were apparently worried about re-election or redistricting, while Ron Paul disdained the measure as not going far enough.

Oddly, Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), did not vote.

The House Republicans voted to abolish Medicare and replace it with a scheme that transfers Medicare money directly to their insurance industry donors while pawning off future seniors with 30% off coupons towards the purchase of private insurance policies. Republicans effectively cut off all Americans age 55 and under from health care as seniors if they are unable to pay cash for 70% of the price of premiums, deductibles, co-pays and other expenses.

Meanwhile, GOP House Armed Services Committee Chair Buck McKeon (CA) continued scheming to shovel ever greater dumptruck loads of cash to General Electric, which had already reported $14 billion in profits without paying taxes, for a second type of jet engine for the F-35 fighter that even the spendthrift Pentagon didn't want.

Abolishing Medicare to hand payments directly to insurance companies and forcing the Pentagon to buy jet engines they didn't want, along with laying another $2.9 trillion tax subsidy before their plutocrat overlords demonstrates once again that Republicans are unabashed vassals of billionaires and trans-national corporations dedicated solely to enriching their feudal patrons at the expense of ordinary Americans.

While the Ryan plan garnered near-unanimous Republican support, many in the GOP grumbled that it neither enriched their overlords enough, or sufficiently scourged ordinary Americans. They preferred a more onerous plan put forth by the conservative Republican Steering Committee. House Democrats, eager to get Republicans on record, overwhelmingly voted "present" on that bill, forcing some scrambling Republicans to change their "yes" votes to "no" to keep the measure from passing. In the end, the measure was narrowly
defeated 119-136.

In the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) vowed to protect Americans from Republican predation, stating the House's vicious action "will never pass the Senate."

The Republicans exhibited an unprecidented level of disdain for the American people in passing Ryan's Path to Prosperity love tome to their plutocrat overlords. The country's richest 20%, already sovereign over 85% of the nation's wealth, will grow exponentially richer should Ryan's express succeed in securing the additional 10% tax cut the Republicans covet. The wealthy's massive financial supremacy already enables them to hire legions of lawyers to tie up all opposition in interminable legal wrangles of attrition, and to unleash armies of lobbyists to buy off politicians and officials. Increasingly, Republicans have demonstrated unconcern to voter backlash, buoyed by elections run through GOP Diebold machines and backed by hordes of white separatists and evangelical supremacists homeschooled on hate and misinterpretations of the Bible who will believe anything the Republican pols and corporate talk-radio shills tell them.  Those ignorant minions, swayed by hate and fear-mongering, already willingly believe President Barack Obama is a foreign Muslim agent, and will accept the GOP claim that abolishing their Medicare and health care access will be good for them.

While the GOP's poor, ignorant racists and religious fanatics may joyfully embrace the agony and misery that awaits them in old age when they discover their Ryan Coupons fall far short of paying private insurance premiums, millions of innocent ordinary Americans will likewise be condemned to die horribly and painfully as their anguished loved ones are forced to watch helplessly.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office warning that Ryan Coupons would fail to cover even a third of future seniors' health care needs did not deter the Roll Call of Infamy's 235 Republicans from consigning hundreds of millions of Americans to desperate destitution and early death. Republicans calculate that Americans now under 55 will first be forced to drain their savings and property to pay the 70% of health care costs Ryan Coupons won't cover before being forced out of medical care to suffer and die destitute and miserable.

The Republican vassals can thus assure their plutocrat overlords that their scheme will guarantee their masters would wring every possible penny from Americans before discarding the spent husks to die in squalor and filth.

Only the thin line of Harry Reid's Democratic Senators and Barack Obama's veto pen stand between Americans and old age horror. Americans, witness to continuous Democratic defection in the name of bipartisanship, can only await their fate.