No Respect For The Elderly

If you want to know why Republicans don't really fear eliminating Medicare and replacing it with vouchers, or going after Social Security, or turning Medicaid into block grants for states to hide brutal cuts in the program, it's because the people it will hurt aren't the people voting for the Republicans in the first place:

A new report finds that black and Latino Americans are significantly more likely to be have difficulty retiring than white Americans on average.

University of California, Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education examined statistics from 2008 to 2010 and determined that black and Latino retirees were more likely to be in the lowest income group. According to their report (PDF), 32 percent blacks and 47 percent of Latinos are in the bottom 25 percent of earners, while only 22 percent of whites were in the bottom 25 percent.

Senior poverty rates among people of color were even more staggering, with 19.3 percent of black seniors and 19 percent of Latino seniors in poverty. Among whites, however, only 7.4 percent of seniors were below the poverty line.

Statistics showed that blacks and Latinos were also far less likely have retirement plans or health insurance offered by their employers, factors that make saving for retirement even harder. 

So yes, there's a reason why Republicans want to cut these programs and make things worse: they figure they won't lose too much of the Senior vote at all from where they are currently.