BY MAURICE WILLIAMS
Capitalist politicians continue to advance their assault on the social wage of working people with the recent vote of the U.S. Senate to end guarantees of aid for those who land on the welfare rolls. With an overwhelming bipartisan vote, Democrats and Republicans approved a bill September 19 that would impose a five- year time limit on welfare benefits, require most recipients to get jobs within two years of receiving benefits, and abolish the federal mandate of giving assistance to every family that meets eligibility requirements. The bill passed in the Senate on a vote of 87 to 12.

"I am proud to say that the Senate has kept our promise," crowed Sen. Bob Dole, the majority leader and presidential candidate who pushed the bill through. His counterpart on the Democratic side, Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, said, "It is the best bill that we are going to get under the circumstances that exist."

While the Senate was finishing off its assault on workers' rights to public assisstance, Republicans in the House of Representatives proposed to eliminate federal entitlement to health benefits for poor, disabled, and elderly people in the Medicaid program. The Medicaid proposal would turn over the health insurance program for poor people to the states and give those governments more power to reduce benefits and decide who gets care and who doesn't.

Some 36 million U.S. residents are enrolled in Medicaid programs, which cover about 75 percent of all nursing home residents. Nearly 18 million children depend on medical treatment through Medicaid. The Senate measure would give each state a predetermined lump sum or "block grant" dubbed "Medigrants" to use at its discretion.

Commenting on the bipartisan assault on Medicaid, Stephen McConnell, of the Alzheimer's Association told the Washington Post, "No one. No matter how frail, how impoverished, will any longer have any guarantee of help."

The welfare legislation bars almost all immigrants from receiving Supplemental Security Income benefits and prohibits new immigrants from taking part in Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) programs for five years. A similar, but even more restrictive, version of the bill was already approved by the House.

Scapegoat women on welfare

The Senate voted to exclude provisions that prohibit cash assistance to unmarried mothers under 18 as well as denying additional benefits to mothers who have more children while on welfare. This will be left up to state administrations to determine the policy. Both measures are a part of the House version of the bill.

Aiming to scapegoat women on welfare for the capitalist government's budget crisis, Senator Phil Gramm, a presidential rival of Dole, said he would fight to include these draconian measures. "We've got to get a provision that denies more and more cash benefits to women who have more and more babies while on welfare," he said.

The Aid to Families with Dependent Children was one percent of the 1995 budget U.S. president Clinton submitted to Congress.

Clinton lauds legislation

According to the Wall Street Journal, Clinton lauded the legislation as a way to "promote work and protect children." Clinton, who pledged in his election campaign to "end welfare as we know it," has made "reform" of entitlement programs a center of his domestic policy since coming into the White House. At the same time he continues to posture as a defender of the poor by threatening to veto a final welfare bill if it contains the more restrictive provisions passed in the House bill.

Clinton also vowed to veto the Republican led effort to cut $270 billion on Medicare spending, the program that guarantees health care costs for retired workers and others. He called the plan "a load of bull" that would finance tax cuts for the wealthy. "I would have no choice but to veto them," Clinton said September 16 at a meeting of senior citizen activists invited to the White House.

A few days later, at a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser of 600 campaign supporters in Philadelphia September 19, Clinton stressed that Medicare costs must be cut. The big business politician, who promotes an image as a champion of health entitlements, has proposed to cut $124 billion from Medicare.

The Republicans' Medicare projection involves making automatic cuts in payments to doctors, hospitals, and health plans, as well as attempting to push elderly people into health maintenance organizations (HMO) and other private insurance plans.

Both ruling class parties are pushing for cuts to Medicare, which benefits 37 million people. But they have not been able to generate much support from working people or middle class layers for these attacks and are wary of possible political fallout.

A major overhaul of the Medicare system is "absolutely at the heart of what we're trying to do," Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich told Newsweek recently. But even in his home district of Smyrna, Georgia, he received a lukewarm response to that idea. On September 16, Gingrich asked a crowd of 200 there how many backed his views on cutting back the Medicare entitlement and only about half those at the meeting raised their hands.

"I think they're going to drive most of us into H.M.O.'s and H.M.O.'s are inherently a poor system of medicine," Virgil Rogers a 68-year-old retiree at the meeting told the New York Times. "They seek to save costs at the expense of quality," he added.  
 
 
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