It’s been a good week for economic reports. For example, we heard that the jobless claims for June were lower than they’ve been in 40 years. Take it from someone who remembers 1975 — it was a long time ago. The job market is finally looking up. And we also found out that Medicare is on stronger footing than anyone could have imagined just a few years ago. Kevin Drum at Mother Jones wrote it up:

Ten years ago, Medicare was a runaway freight train. Spending was projected to increase indefinitely, rising to 13 percent of GDP by 2080. This year, spending is projected to slow down around 2040, and reaches only 6 percent of GDP by 2090. Six percent! That’s half what we thought a mere decade ago. If that isn’t spectacular, I don’t know what is.

Drum points out that this is largely being driven by the fact that medical costs overall have slowed dramatically. This is due to a number of factors, but one of the most significant has to be the Affordable Care Act’s cuts to provider payments, which you will certainly recall had the Republicans whirling like tops with claims that President Obama was planning to turn the elderly into Soylent Green — or submit them to ghoulish “death panels” at the very least. It was one of the primary motivating factors that drove the white elderly Republican base to invade town hall meetings by the hundreds and storm the voting booths in November of 2010 to decimate the Democratic congressional majority.

Ads like these ran all over the nation:

Republicans have run similar ads in every election since. Indeed, it’s their most potent argument against Obamacare. And there’s been every reason to believe that the Republicans would use this message again in 2016. After all, the Medicare constituency is their bread and butter, and they are, quite reasonably, protective of the program. They may selfishly not want anyone else to have health care but they damned sure want to make sure that seniors have the program. In case anyone hasn’t noticed, the elderly have a lot of health problems. It has always made perfect sense for the GOP to demagogue any and all changes to the program.

This represented a very dramatic change in the demographic make-up of the two parties. Since their inception in the New Deal and Great Societies, Social Security and Medicare had made loyal Democratic voters out of the elderly. They were fiercely protective of the programs and the Republicans were caught by the trap their ideology forced them into. Ronald Reagan’s GOP may have looked congenial to many older people — but they knew that he wanted to end the programs that made it possible for them to live with dignity in their old age. So when they heard his famous recording railing against Medicare — in which he said,”one of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project, most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it” — it sounded abstract and irrelevant to their very practical needs. (Not to mention obtuse; a medical program is a humanitarian project.) It’s likely that many of them were just as staunchly anti-communist and anti-statist as Reagan, but few were willing to die prematurely to make that particular political point.

In the late 1980s, when a virulent strain of deficit fever invaded the swamps around the nation’s capital, the government raised premiums on Medicare to provide some new coverage that many people didn’t need and which didn’t cover the one thing they need need, long term care. Seniors rebelled and they rebelled vociferously:

This summer’s bitter struggle over the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988 has damaged the credibility of one of the nation`s largest lobbies, both in Congress and among the 28 million members of the American Association of Retired Persons. From his retirement home in Las Vegas, Daniel Hawley, a 64-year-old former airline pilot, has helped organize the stunning grass-roots protest that has shaken AARP and pushed this largest expansion of Medicare benefits to the brink of congressional repeal. “They thought retired people were sitting around doing their ceramics and their little aerobics classes in senior centers and wouldn’t give any fight,” said Hawley. “Well, they found out differently.”

Indeed they did. This infamous (and hilarious) video of seniors chasing the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means committee perfectly captures the power the medicare constituency has over the U.S. Government: