Two thousand ten just may go down as the year that Medicare is finally getting the recognition it deserves. Well, perhaps in a half-perverse way, anyway. The government entitlement program, which has just celebrated 45 years as the godfather of all payers in healthcare, continues to gain ink in an otherwise unrelated news cycle. President Obama appears to be taking credit for saving the program’s solvency singlehandedly, as his vision of healthcare reform would be far less vital without a provision to forming a leaner, meaner CMS.

In his weekly address to the American people, Obama reiterated his commitment to a program that is more “secure” than ever, a “commitment to America’s seniors” — never wavering from that core point. Obama will likely continue that same tenor as he campaigns for (some of the more vulnerable) Democrats in this year’s midterms, highlighting Medicare’s fiscal leanness with such tenacity, that to acknowledge that the country is still mired in a recession flirting with across-the-board double digit unemployment and ever-spiraling jobless claims is completely tangential.

At this stage, it is not clear how this gambit of Obama’s will play out in November, especially when wide swaths of the general population demographic — not just seniors — need the reassurance he continues to express on health reform as generalizable and essential to economic recovery in this country. All the while, the GOP will continue to hold up Obama’s enthusiasm for government’s role in Medicare as reason that 16% of this country’s GDP is one of the prime causes of the current economic disarray.

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