Tear Up Your AARP Card

My grandfather destroyed his years ago and it's time for our elderly readers to do the same. The AARP is not the caring seniors club that it used to be. It's morphed into a self-interested insurance company that's been entirely bought off by the Obama administration.

In May of this year, the AARP board of directors elected a new president: Barry Rand. Rand is a genuine success story and self-made man who worked his way up through the corporate world with tenacity. He also reads from the same playbook as Jesse Jackson, gaining a reputation for fierce advocacy on behalf of minority-owned businesses. In this sense, he was an odd choice. Why elect a man who has spent his life advocating for racial minorities to helm a group that advocates for seniors?

Rand is a Democrat with strong ties to Barack Obama, including a $2,300 donation to his presidential campaign in 2008. Although a clear picture of the relationship between Rand and Obama through the years is unclear, it's preposterous to think that Obama never came to the attention of minority advocate Rand.

In Rand, Obama had a pliant liberal ideologue who could be persuaded. Almost immediately, the payoffs to the AARP began. The group received some $18 million in stimulus money, an incredible sum and the fourteenth-largest stimulus payout in Washington, DC. (These are those "shovel-ready jobs" Obama and Biden were always harping about.) The other big kickback will come if Congress passes the health care bill. As detailed by political pollster Dick Morris, the AARP had transitioned from an advocacy group to an insurance company, selling seniors "Medi-gap," which filled the holes in the government's Medicare coverage. President George W. Bush knocked the wind out of this program when he created Medicare Advantage, which served the same purpose as Medi-gap, but did so with much lower costs thanks to heavy government subsidies. Obama's health care bill diverts Medicare Advantage subsidies which will drive costs up and, surprise surprise, give the AARP a serious edge.

Obama wanted something substantial for these kickbacks. In August, he gave the AARP what seemed like a warning when he claimed he had the endorsement of the group. In fact the AARP had yet to endorse ObamaCare and asked for a retraction, but the signal had been sent. Shortly thereafter, Barry Rand's AARP endorsed Barack Obama's health care bill.

This ignited a firestorm among senior citizens, who began tearing up their AARP cards and mailing them back to Washington. Sen. John McCain, a senior himself, encouraged them to do just that on the Senate floor. With that one endorsement, Rand presided over perhaps the largest AARP exodus in history.

If you're currently an AARP member and still have your card, it's time to consider doing the same. Your organization has thrown itself into the cigar-wreathed Washington back rooms with Barack Obama. It has endorsed legislation that will cut both Medicare and Medicare Advantage. It has blithely ignored concerns among seniors that the bill could bloom into government-run health care that would ration treatments for the elderly. It has thrown its weight behind a bill that ultimately does nothing to help seniors, who already have taxpayer-funded health care and prescription drugs.

The AARP under Barry Rand has shown itself to be more concerned with receiving free public money than stumping for seniors. It's time to take your money elsewhere.