Reptilicus,

I'm a liberal, but I'm tired of seeing this question repeated every week. I'll try to answer.

Part of the dogma for some conservatives is the idea that the private sector can operate better and more efficiently than can the government, right? As such, it's reasonable to believe that many conservatives believe that a private system for insuring senior citizens could easily provide better care than does Medicare/caid. I can even imagine what such a system might look like, and it's beautiful: health insurance, when bought by an individual or an employer, would cover an individual for life, not for a year, and the benefits associated with that care would increase over time as more money is put into it. It would be a great solution, solving all the problems of pre-existing conditions and portability of coverage and even would provide pressure for insurance companies to keep costs down (since they'd be obligated, decades in advance, for covering expensive proceedures). Eventually, by the time someone is old and has contributed for a lifetime, the healthcare they've earned and paid for over decades would both provide benefits greater to Medicare and, incidentally, solve many of the problems associated with today's system.

Unfortunately, no one has been paying into a similar system for decades.

Any system favoured by conservatives would likely therefore either be a) too expensive to put in place immediately, or b) require years of foresight, planning, and transition to put in place, something not possible given the swiftness with which our political whims change in this country. There is no way to go from Medicare/caid to a system that may be favoured by many conservatives without a politically and fiscally improbable transition.

You ask why conservatives or Republicans don't want to abolish Medicare? It's because no one, Republican or Democrat, want to leave our seniors destitute, and that's what would happen were Medicare abolished. It's a strawman to think otherwise, or to think that there's some secret hypocrisy amongst conservatives. It's no better and little different than the idiots who think they know that Obama, the closest socialist, wants to abolish capitalism, and I think we'd both agree that that's a crock of shit.