Nine times since 1970, the trustees had warned that Medicare would 'approach" bankruptcy within seven years. As was the case with similar warnings about Social Security trust funds going broke, every time The System had responded in a bipartisan way to save it. Impending Medicare insolvency had always been solved by trimming payment schedules to health care providers and by either increasing the Medicare tax rate or raising the amount of income on which the tax was levied.... Now, the trustees said, it would require about $100 billion over ten years -- an expenditure barely felt in the multitrillion-dollar American economy -- to remedy the shortfall forecast in 1995. But this time, the Republicans had ruled out higher Medicare taxes to safeguard the program and were reluctant to state exactly how their economies would be achieved.

Haley Barbour, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, thought the new trustees' report was "manna from heaven".. (H)e and Gingrich seized on the trustee report and elevated it to a dire threat to all thirty-seven and a half million Medicare beneficiaries...

Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster, circulated an eight-page private memo among House Republicans entitled "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Communicating Medicare." Luntz warned Republicans that senior citizens would never accept changes in Medicare until they "were convinced the system's going broke." He added, "If we can't prove that Medicare is going bankrupt, we'll never be able to sell our solutions...." Go on the attack, he advised the new Republican House. Accuse Democrats of '"using 'scare tactics' by allowing a program to go broke...just to score political points."

As in the earlier health care battle, that strategic advice was followed with singular unanimity. .....(B)ut it was not as one-sided as the battle two years before. This time they faced unified opposition from congressional Democrats who pummeled them for "destroying" Medicare and whose attacks were rewarded with sharp drops in public approval for the new Republican congressional majority.

Five months after the Revolution began, Democrats thought they had found the key to their political comeback.

--From "The System"