Promise Broken - Trump To Cut Social Security/Medicare

It looks like Donald Trump is poised to break another solemn promise -- this time to the group that gave him the most support in the 2016 election (Seniors). During the election campaign, Trump promised that he would not cut either Social Security or Medicare, and seniors (those 65 or older) believed him. They were conned.

The following article (about Trump's plan to cut the budget) is from Bipartisan Report:

Throughout the course of his presidential campaign, Donald Trump made several major promises, but one of his biggest was that he would make no cuts to entitlement programs such as Social Security or Medicare. In May of last year, Trump even took to Twitter to brag about his pledge protect Social Security.  Trump’s term hasn’t even began, but it’s looking like we can mark this one as broken.

Trump's transition team have laid out their blueprint for the federal budget and it calls for massive spending cuts on a wide array of programs. Overall, Trump’s plan, which is heavily based on a recent Heritage Foundation proposal, would reduce federal spending by more than $10 trillion over the course of the next decade. The spending cuts would hit nearly every aspect of the federal budget aside from the military, including entitlement programs.

A recent report by Mother Jones found that this plan would cut Social Security by eight percent, Medicare by 41 percent and Medicaid by 47 percent. The plan didn’t provide much in the way of details for changing Medicaid beyond a spending cap, but we know a bit about their plans for Social Security and Medicare.

MEDICARE:

The proposed changes to Medicare would increase the eligibility age, increase premiums for part B and D, add a “temporary” premium to part A, decrease subsides for seniors of “significant” income and reform cost sharing arrangements.

However, the biggest change would be the plan to move to a “premium support” model starting in 2021. The premium support model is a voucher system where seniors would be given coupons in order to buy private health insurance. In a lot of ways, it’s rather similar to the Affordable Care Act. That isn’t too surprising considering the ACA is actually based on a Republican plan.

In short, the Republican’s plan for Medicare seems to be to replace it with a watered down version of the ACA.

SOCIAL SECURITY:

Just like with Medicare, the GOP wants to increase the eligibility age for Social Security and index the retirement age so it keeps going up. We guess the GOP just assumes everyone wants to drop dead in their 90s while working as a Wal-Mart greeter.

In addition, they plan to reduce benefits by adopting chained CPI adjusted for inflation. They also plan to “transition the payment to a flat, anti-poverty benefit focused on individuals who need it most.” We don’t know what that means. In fact, we’re pretty sure the people who wrote it haven’t figured out what it means. If we had to guess, they’re probably planning on privatizing it because that’s been the right’s goal since the program was introduced.