Reverse Robin Hood

This is by request. The person who asked me to talk about this was somewhat distraught; she was convinced that disaster was imminent. Understandably so, as she depends on certain federal and state programs for her health and well-being.
The current political situation regarding Medicare and Medicaid is hard to understand. It is being made more abstruse because of a whole group who seem to working from a position that has more to do with pandering to their political base, a place where theory and emotion play as much a part as the practical and reasonable. They have accepted a particular set of ideals (if that is quite the right word for such a collection of negatives) that they cannot compromise. and any other set of standards is seen as not merely wrong, but repugnant and even evil.
On the one hand, one can only applaud such a commitment to one's beliefs. Too often, our world has only grasped for what worked, settling for the the feasible more than the acceptable. If it made money, if it kept the crowds quiet, if it appealed to the people in power, that would be the status quo. But this group has a mirror-image approach. By this way of looking at things, the poor, the needy, the elderly and disabled, were not only not worthy of help, but a drag on the relentless progress of the younger generation. Scrooge-like, they dismissed such people with the wish that they should simply leave them alone so they might move forward, might focus on that bottom line. Even more, they would take what few resources the lower classes might have and give them to those they saw as deserving: the upper income population who might fritter away the meager resources of the needy in whatever brief time.
They have their alternatives to Medicare and Medicaid, albeit quite shallow and facile. One can applaud the implied concept of giving more responsibility for medical expenses to those receiving that care. The trouble lies in two areas: First, the people receiving the help have little experience dealing with the complications of medical finance, nor would they have any back-up to compensate for expenses not otherwise covered.  Second, the medical professionals already have a history (in some small instances) of fraud and/or incompetence. Take away the (sometimes onerous) oversight of federal/state officials, and what is to check  the clinicians who might realize how little they are getting out of this already, and now would look for any way in which services could be trimmed and charges increased?
This does not address the very real concerns of those who fear losing the help they receive now, however sparse the number of doctors, however questionable the quality of the care. When someone fears losing everything, it does not comfort to be told, well, not quite everything! But the debate has become black-and-white. This is not a discussion of how Medicaid and Medicare might be improved, but of how it might be eliminated altogether and some doppelganger put in its place.