Beaver County Reds – 4/18/11

This page was last updated on April 19, 2011.

THERE IS NO DEFICIT!!!; Randy Shannon; Progressive Democrats of America – PA 4th CD Chapter; April 18, 2011.

Medicare is the Solution – Not the Problem – Hands Off!; Randy Shannon; Progressive Democrats of America – PA 4th CD Chapter; April 18, 2011.

If you’re familiar with the positions taken by Progressive Democrats of America – PA 4th CD Chapter, you won’t be surprised to learn at least three members of Beaver County Reds are communists, whether they still refer to themselves that way or not. BCR leadership consists of Tina Shannon (chairperson), Randy Shannon (treasurer), Robert Schmetzer (vice president), Peter Deutsch (secretary), and Carl Davidson (webmaster and perhaps unofficial leader), a self-described Marxist who once “tr[ied] to create a new communist party.” They also appear to be the leaders of Beaver County Peace Links. Of this group, one was a leader of the now-defunct Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) and, according to KeyWiki, two are (or at least were in 1993) members of the Communist Party USA. The Shannons were also leaders of the apparently-defunct Beaver County Coalition for Social Justice. In the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) [originally a splinter group of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA)], Mr. Davidson is a co-chair and the Shannons are members of the CCDS national coordinating committee. Robert Schmetzer is Democrat party local town chair for South Heights.

“THERE IS NO DEFICIT!!!”

This is a strange post. It simply consists of two charts that have absolutely nothing to do with whether or not there is a deficit. The first chart allegedly shows bank reserves over time. If you look at the chart and wonder what “Quantitative Easing” means, it’s Fedspeak for “printing” money electronically.

The second chart allegedly shows corporate profits over time.

It would be nice to see Mr. Shannon explain what either of these charts has to do with determining the existence of a deficit. Besides, if “THERE IS NO DEFICIT!!!,” which means we need no more tax revenue, why do Mr. Shannon and BCR support tax rate increases for “the rich?”

This is at least the second “move along, nothing to see here” piece by BCR. A previous article tried to convince us there is no problem with Socialist Security.

“Medicare is the solution …”

This post tells us “Republicans want to privatize Medicare and slash Medicaid.” In a country built by the private sector, when did “privatizing” something become a bad thing? In any case, there are no GOP proposals “to privatize Medicare.”

Regarding Medicare, the proposal is to change from Medicare paying service providers to providing beneficiaries with a grant sufficient to buy their own Medicare-approved insurance plan from private insurers. The idea is to promote competition to help keep costs down and allow individual beneficiaries to tailor their benefits to their needs. It’s similar to what happened with Medicare Part D, the prescription drug benefit. Though I opposed Medicare Part D, it has the distinction of being just about the only entitlement program, or any program for that matter, to come in under spending estimates, from $694 million over 10 years to about $395 million over 10 years. The other part of this is the changes would affect only those currently 54 years old and younger when they eventually become eligible to collect benefits at age 65 or whatever. That is, anyone currently 55 and older would receive benefits exactly the same as today.

In the case of Medicaid, we need some background. Medicaid is a program operated by each state but is jointly funded by the feds and the state. Though the formula is complicated, by law the feds must provide somewhere between 50% and 83% of a state’s Medicaid expenditures. As a result, there’s no incentive for states to control Medicaid spending, allowing generous and/or wasteful states to dump 50% to 83% of their largesse on federal taxpayers. The current Republican Medicaid proposal is to switch to block grants to the states. This would allow a state to spend as much on Medicaid as it wants without putting federal taxpayers on the hook for excessive spending due to either overly-generous benefits or sloppy operation.

Mr. Shannon goes on to write, “Instead, we need to take the corporate greed and waste out of our healthcare system, and make healthcare a human right by extending Medicare to everyone.” Regarding “corporate greed,” according to an Associated Press story (“Fact Check: Health insurer profits not so fat”; Calvin Woodward; October 25, 2009), “Health insurance profit margins typically run about 6%, give or take a point or two. That’s anemic compared with other forms of insurance and a broad array of industries, even some beleaguered ones. Profits barely exceeded 2% of revenues in the latest annual measure. This partly explains why the credit ratings of some of the largest insurers were downgraded to negative from stable heading into this year, as investors were warned of a stagnant if not shrinking market for private plans. … Health insurers posted a 2.2% profit margin last year, placing them 35th on the Fortune 500 list of top industries.”

As for “we need to take the … waste out of our healthcare system,” Mr. Shannon appeared to oppose that action when he wrote “We agree that healthcare costs are a serious problem, but cutting Medicare and Medicaid won’t help.” Please read my paper entitled “Healthcare.”

Finally, if you believe BCR really cares about our healthcare, I have a bridge to sell you. For communists or whatever they want to call themselves, it’s all about power of the state over the individual. When government controls healthcare, it can “justify” control over every aspect of our lives by claiming the necessity to control healthcare costs.