BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS
Democratic president William Clinton has taken the lead in preparing major cuts in Medicaid, the federal program that provides health care to low income families in the United States. When he unveils his federal budget to Congress on February 6, Clinton will reportedly seek cuts in Medicaid ranging between $11 and $22 billion in the next five years.

This is the bosses' latest step in a multifaceted assault on the social wage of working people. Since Clinton's reelection last November, the White House has been in the forefront of the drive by big business to win acceptance for dismantling Social Security and doing away with Medicare and Medicaid as social entitlements.

At the same time, the scandal-mongering among the top layers of Democrats and Republicans has reached a higher pitch -reflecting the nervousness and tactical divisions among the wealthy rulers over how best to orchestrate the employers' war on labor. Barely a week before Clinton's second inauguration, three-year-old sexual harassment charges against the president by former Arkansas state employee Paula Jones, and the "ethics" investigation of House Speaker Newton Gingrich dominated headline news and editorial pages.

According to the New York Times, Clinton will propose a "cap" on Medicaid, which will limit growth in spending for the program to 4-5 percent annually. The pretext once again is balancing the federal budget. At the moment, benefits for Medicaid, a means-tested program, are available to anyone who meets federal and state eligibility standards.

Medicaid was enacted in 1965 along with Medicare, which provides health coverage for the elderly and disabled. These programs were an extension of the concessions working people won through earlier labor battles, registered in the Social Security Act of 1935.

Together, these benefits make up the social wage - an elementary safety net giving workers the possibility to make it through a lifetime by having some care for the young, minimal health coverage for the elderly, pensions, unemployment insurance, and workers compensation for injuries on the job. The labor movement fought to win them as entitlements - programs that are not up for review in every yearly budget -in order to increase social solidarity and undercut the dog-eat-dog competition imposed on the working class by the profit system. Winning these benefits reduced the proportion of the value working people produce through their labor that the employers are able to expropriate as surplus value.

In their quest to shore up declining profit rates, the bosses are trying to make inroads in this social wage. Their first major successful foray was Clinton's signing of the Welfare Reform Act last August. With a stroke of the pen, the Democratic president made good on his pledge to "end welfare as we know it." He eliminated Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), hacking a piece out of the Social Security Act for the first time in 60 years.

That law, along with the anti-immigrant legislation Clinton signed last year, is already affecting millions previously eligible for Medicaid. Last year, Medicaid spending grew 3.3 percent before inflation, compared to an average yearly growth of 15 percent between 1985 and 1995.

At the same time, the number of working people and their children who lack health insurance, either from private employers or the federal government, is steadily rising. The January 15 Wall Street Journal reported that in 1995, 9.8 million children, almost 14 percent of all children in the United States, were uninsured for the entire year, up from 8.2 million in 1987. "The total would have been even higher if Medicaid hadn't expanded rapidly, partly offsetting a sharp drop in employer-sponsored coverage," the Journal said. "Advocates worry that changes in the welfare law may increase the number of uninsured children by making it more complicated for some families to sign up for Medicaid."

Liberals' hypocritical concern for kids
The Clinton administration and many of the president's fellow liberal Democrats are cynically using this situation to justify the White House assault on Medicaid. The same article in the Journal pointed out that "Senate Democrats will hold a news conference tomorrow [January 16] to tout their plans for extending health coverage to uninsured children," which they have dubbed "Kid Care."

Clinton is reportedly considering a proposal for a $750 million-a-year program to help insure the so-called "gap kids." These are children whose families can't afford private insurance nor are eligible for Medicaid. Where's the money going to come from, according to the Democratic administration? From "Medicaid savings," that is cutting this program, which will mean that more workers and their children will go without health coverage.

"A cap on Medicaid spending could directly affect the people who depend on the program for health insurance," said an article in the January 14 New York Times. "If a state reached its limit, it would have two choices. It could cut back the amount or the scope of its Medicaid benefits, or it could curb payments to doctors, nursing homes and other health care providers, reducing the incentive for them to serve Medicaid patients."

Democratic Senator Daniel Moynihan has been in the front ranks of those pushing the capitalists' propaganda offensive against these programs. During a December 1 appearance in the NBC television show "Meet the Press," Moynihan stated, "The Medicaid fund is not going broke. It is broke. It has been in a negative cash flow for four years." On that program, Moynihan also campaigned for cutting Medicare and reducing cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security pensions by arbitrarily lowering the Consumer Price Index.

In early November, Clinton had already outlined his latest plan for cutting Medicare, which now covers 38 million elderly and disabled. During last year's election campaign Clinton blasted Republicans for their 1994 proposals to slash $270 billion out of Medicare and do away with Medicaid altogether by replacing it with federal "block grants" to state governments. The Democratic president, however, often omitted the fact that he had offered to chop $124 billion from Medicare a year ago.

Some Democrats, like Rep. John Dingell of Michigan and Senator Robert Graham of Florida, are reportedly urging the White House to drop the plan for a ceiling on Medicaid spending. These liberals argue that Republicans have withdrawn many of their most draconian measures of the now defunct "Contract with America," including the proposal to junk Medicaid. Clinton, however, who never pushed his agenda to counter the "Republican right" but to best serve the interests of the ruling rich, appears resolved to drive on this front.

Scandal-mongering spreads
Meanwhile, allegations of corruption and sexual misconduct of top public officials have continued to spread.

Gingrich, who was reelected Speaker of the House of Representatives in a close vote January 7, faced new charges of illegally "masterminding" his defense in the ongoing "ethics" investigation into his conduct.

The controversy heated up after the January 10 New York Times published a portion of the transcript of a telephone call between Gingrich and his associates, where the House Speaker discussed how his allies should respond to his admission he had misled the House investigation. Democrats said this showed Gingrich broke a pledge to the "ethics" committee he would not orchestrate a counterattack. Congress is supposed to vote on a proposed sanction against the Republican January 21.

The tape leaked to the Times was supposedly recorded through a private scanner by John and Alice Martin, a couple of Florida Democrats, who turned it over to Rep. James McDermott, a Democrat on the House "ethics" committee.

The Republicans quickly counterattacked, accusing McDermott of violating federal law and forcing him to quit the committee January 14. The FBI opened an investigation into "possible illegal telephone interception and the subsequent dissemination of the contents of the telephone call." And the chairman of the House commerce committee asked the Federal Communications Commission to launch an inquiry into how the Martins intercepted the Gingrich call.

At same time, the charges of sexual misconduct against Clinton, first raised by Paula Jones in a civil suit in February 1994, got new life and prominence in the media. The case is now before the Supreme Court, which is weighing a motion by Clinton's lawyers that a sitting president should be virtually immune from civil litigation until his term expires.  
 
 
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