Medicare, Medicaid, & Social Security in the hands of the "Super" Committee

If ever we needed verification that members of Congress are not acting as representatives of the people, we have it now: the deadlock of the Super Committee. Even though its failure seemed like a foregone conclusion, it still made me angry when no compromise was reached.

I think that the majority of us agree that we need a combination of spending cuts and increased revenues to get the economy on the road to recovery. I also feel that most of the American people want Social Security to be excluded in the negotiations of budget excisions. Programs such as Medicare and Medicaid have been lifesavers for our elderly and disabled citizens and should not be limited in the services they provide for these populations. The exception is that savings can indeed be generated in the two programs through elimination of inadvertent duplication of services and fraudulent activities by those delivering the services as well as the consumers who are taking unfair advantage of the system.

Many of the remaining entitlement programs can be modified or tweaked without doing away with them altogether, and there are probably some that may need to be terminated.

The Super Committee's charge was to find a compromise between spending cuts and increases in revenue. The writing on the wall, a pledge taken by all six of the Republican members of the committee, should have been apparent to everyone. This pledge, vowed to ultra-conservative Grover Norquist and made public, was never to raise taxes under any circumstances. Mr. Norquist, who is not an elected representative of the people, has been referred to as "the 13th person in the room" by committee member Senator John Kerry.

In this case most decidedly (but in others as well), the influence of Mr. Norquist certainly outweighed the will of the people. Most polls on the issue showed that approximately 70% of Americans favored raising revenues through tax increases on the top one per cent of income earners. As a member of the vanishing middle class, I was extremely angry that one man, Mr. Norquist, possessed more political power than hundreds of millions of voters.

Whenever I hear members of Congress refer to their counterparts in the other party as "my friends across the aisle," I think that one of two things is operating: Either they have undergone anger management training and are looking at the situation from a more benign standpoint … or perhaps the lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are like 'two peas in a pod.'

The fact that the Democrats on the committee did not back down (i.e., did not give in to one-sided Republican proposals to cut spending) leaves me with hope that at least some of the members of Congress are listening to and care about the will of the people.

Related reading on this subject: Group therapy in New York City.