Asheville Citizen-Times 2-21-08

Diminished health care

The Bush administration’s proposal to cut $208 billion from the growth of entitlement programs such as Medicare over five years, while increasing the Pentagon budget by $36 billion this year alone, reflects a dangerously skewed concept of what keeps Americans secure.

The $3.1 trillion Bush budget for the 2009 fiscal year, which begins in October, demonstrates a set of priorities that ought to alarm every American.

It threatens to sacrifice safety-net and other critical domestic programs and to undermine the nation’s medical infrastructure and economic vigor in order to maintain the bloated, wasteful military-industrial complex former President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the nation about in the early 1950s.

Cuts to Medicare and Medicaid “would be very devastating to us and to the community,â€