Florida is a key swing state in the 2012 presidential election, and Obama is already struggling there.  It also has the highest percentage of senior citizens of any state in the union. Can you chip in $10 to help us run these online ads targeted to seniors and future retirees? With your help, we can spread our pledge not to vote for anyone participating in benefit cuts, including President Obama.

Call your member of Congress TODAY and tell them if they vote to cut Social Security benefits, you won’t vote for them in the next election.

Tell them you’re on to their little game of rotating villains.  Because they’re about to tear a big hole in the social safety net, in a way that will immediately hurt millions of senior citizens.  Nobody is interested in their cheap theatrics.

It’s amazing what you can learn reading the Washington Post. Today its lead editorial told readers that reducing the annual cost of living adjustment for Social Security by 0.3 percentage points won’t hurt. This would come as news to most seniors who rely on Social Security for most of their income.

Republicans may cling to this belief that they still want to muck around with Medicare, but it’s not going to happen. For one, their partners in an entire house of Congress don’t want to touch the thing. I suppose they can give means testing a shot, but privatization isn’t happening.

So for any big changes in the safety net, there’s Medicaid. . . .

Why would you play this funny? Why give the message that old people are worthy of derision, essentially because they’re old? This looks like a really bad Super Bowl spot when the issue discussed is deadly serious. Republicans are claiming that the ad represents “scare tactics” but no, I could show you scare tactics. A closeup of a senior’s hand as she struggles in the last throes of life and then pulling out to reveal she’s laying on the middle of the sidewalk as white men in suits ignore her, that’s scare tactics. This looks like a GoDaddy ad.

The whole CBO report is really damning. The bottom line is that seniors would pay more for less coverage. It’s not a reform plan, it’s a cost-shifting plan. Public debt goes down as private debt goes up. And if the senior can’t afford coverage. . . tough.

There are two very simple, straight forward things you can do with Medicare if you want to make a big reduction in the deficit: you can either destroy Medicare, or vastly expand it.

Republicans are about to unveil a budget that privatizes Medicare. It ends enrollment to the single-payer program entirely within 10 years, and everybody else who reaches the age of 65 gets a voucher they can use to purchase health insurance on the private market. The voucher’s value does not increase over time even as health insurance rates rise, so it will cover less and less of the cost of insurance. These Medicare-certified private plans, ironically, would live on an exchange, much like the private market in the Affordable Care Act. But two things here: one, the Medicare certification would have no standards like essential benefits, annual limits and minimum guarantees, unlike the vision for insurance exchanges in the ACA; and two, this would cost more money overall, since Medicare is much cheaper than private insurance, similar to all single-payer health care systems. The burden of that additional cost would fall on the individual, as the voucher would stretch less over time.

If Republicans try to bring repeal to the floor as an amendment to a separate bill – a non-germane amendment, Democrats will try to break it out and force votes on popular elements of the law.

As expected, the $250 one-time benefit sought by Democrats for Social Security recipients has become a talking point in the campaign. Both Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have committed their chambers to a vote on the bill in the lame-duck session, with strong support from the President. But the lack of support caucus-wide in the Senate may throw a wrench into this plan.