Last night, I shared with you how right-wingers - and the news media they influence - have been predicting the collapse of the Medicare Insurance program ever since it was created in the summer of 1965 by Lyndon Johnson as part of his Great Society program.

Here’s an example that I shared with you from from the Washington Post on March 6, 1983:

Senate Budget Committee Chairman [Republican] Pete Domenici warned the nation's governors the other day, "Medicare can be bankrupt in 2 1/2 years," unless some way is found to put the brakes on its burgeoning costs.

And this one from The New York Times on January 22, 1989:

The fund that pays all Government reimbursement for hospital care of Medicare patients is projected to become insolvent in the next decade or so.

In fact, there’s a long history of predicting that Medicare is going broke any minute.

The New York Times continued that tradition Wednesday of this week by writing:

Officials have said that the program, which provides health care to people 65 and older, is not sustainable in its current form.

Really?

Fortunately, the real economists over at the Center for Economic and Policy Research noticed that, and wrote in their "Beat the Press" blog:

This is not true. There is no, as in zero, none, official document that says the program is not sustainable in its current form. There are official documents that show the program will need additional revenue at some point. The ACA passed by Congress last year reduced the projected shortfall in the program by more than 75 percent.

Wow - the ACA fixed Medicare last year.

What’s the ACA, you ask?

Well, actually, it’s usually called "Obamacare" by Republicans. The rest of the country knows it as the "Affordable Care Act".

And it did largely fix Medicare - which is why the Congressional Budget Office published this graph last year, showing - in the dotted lines - where Medicare was going before Obamacare, and in the solid lines where Medicare is going now.

Yes, the President has fixed Medicare.

In fact, it’s even more astounding than that.

As the folks over at the Center for Economic and Policy Research point out:

As it stands, the projected shortfall over the program’s 75-year planning horizon is less than 0.4 percent of GDP. This is less than one quarter of the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have only been going on for ten years - and they cost four times more than all the 75-year projections for shortfalls in Medicare.

And another point - when you look at your paycheck, you’ll see a FICA deduction - it’s the deduction for Medicare and Social Security.

FICA is also known as the "payroll tax" because everybody - even if you only earn a few thousand dollars a year - everybody pays it.

But consider this - the name F-I-C-A stands for Federal Insurance Contributions Act.

Insurance?

Yes, insurance.

The real name of Social Security is: The Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) program.

And that insurance program was amended in 1965 to include health care insurance - in what we call Medicare Insurance.

Social Security and Medicare are insurance programs that insure all of us against poverty and illness in old age.

So whenever any politician refers to them, they should include the word "insurance".

As in, "We’re thinking of cutting the benefits in the Medicare Insurance program ".

You see, these are not welfare programs - they’re insurance programs. And, as such, they shouldn’t be turned into welfare programs by being means-tested, so that they’re only available to poor people.

Because, as Bill Clinton showed us when he bragged that he had "ended welfare as we know it" - it’s easy to cut things for poor people, and - tragically - it can even be politically popular - even a Democrat can get away with it.

So let’s, once and for all, stop all the stupidity and all the demagoguery.

They’re insurance programs we all pay into, and they’re not going broke.

And balancing the nation’s budget by cutting Medicare instead of the Pentagon is just wrong.

End the wars and heal Americans.

Pass it on!

That's The Big Picture.