PLANK AUGUST 12, 2012
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The Romney campaign is pushing back hard against accusations that Paul Ryan, and by extension Romney himself, are threatening Medicare. And they're recycling an old, discredited attack line to do it.
The real assault on Medicare, according to Romney and his allies, comes from President Obama, because the Affordable Care Act calls for $700 billion in cuts to Medicare over the next decade. Here's Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus making that argument on NBC's "Meet the Press" this morning:
He stole $700 billion from Medicare to fund Obamacare. If any person in this entire debate has blood on their hands in regard to Medicare, it's Barack Obama. He's the one that's destroying Medicare.
Capturing the cynicism on display here isn't easy. I'm going to try anyway.
Yes, the Affordable Care Act includes substantial cuts to Medicare. But Ryan's own budget, which nearly every House Republican voted to pass and which Romney has said he would sign as president, leaves those cuts in place and uses them to finance other priorities. In other words, the Romney campaign is attacking a proposal that Romney and his allies endorse.
The most significant difference between the two sides, at least for the short- to medium-term, is how they handle the savings these cuts generate. Obamacare puts the money back into the pockets of people who need help with their medical bills. A portion of the money is earmarked for children and non-elderly Americans, who, starting in 2014, will become eligible for Medicaid or receive tax credits to offset the cost of private insurance. A smaller, but still significant, portion of the money is for seniors. It helps them pay for prescription drugs, by filling the "donut hole" in Medicare Par D coverage. It also eliminates out-of-pocket costs for annual wellness visits, some cancer screenings, and other preventative services. Those benefits have actually started already: In the first six months of this year, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, more than 16 million seniors took advantage of the free preventative care provision.
Ryan's budget—which, again, Romney has repeatedly embraced and said he would sign—actually takes those new benefits away. The Part D donut hole would open back up. Access to free preventative care would vanish. And where would Ryan and Romney put the money instead? They say it's for deficit reduction. I'd say it's really for their big new tax cuts, which disproportionately benefit the wealthy. If somebody is "stealing" from seniors here, it's not Obama.
The two sides have each proposed additional changes to Medicare, the most significant of which would start to take effect a decade from now. They represent very different approaches to health care policy and are worthy of a serious, honest debate. But it's hard to have that kind of discussion when one side cares so little about presenting the facts accurately.
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11 comments
Good points, JC. But what I find so encouraging about the Ryan pick is that even on the superficial but crucial level of of sound bites and simplistic slogans, Obama comes out ahead in this battle. Republicans can unfairly fume all they want about his gutting funding for Medicare, but what people really care about is who'll maintain the benefits. Ryan, and now Romney, has a plan that explicitly guts Medicare as we know it. And Obama will exploit that to the hilt.
- Thunderroad
August 12, 2012 at 3:39pm
Health Care for the elderly is expensive and for the vast majority of us, beyond affordability. Ryan recognizes only that it is expensive and his solution is to just reduce the government's portion of it. Well, I'd like to reduce the government's portion of defense spending. Nobody to pick up the slack? Isn't that the same for elderly medical care? I presume Ryan feels our elderly are less important than Fighting Imaginary WMD's or beating back the Taliban.
- Nusholtz
August 12, 2012 at 4:14pm
Better yet, send the elderly to fight the Taliban! Win-win!
- Sophia
August 12, 2012 at 4:59pm
Prepare to fight fair, but expect lies and unfair attacks on the other side. When the fighting starts fight lies with truth, and attacks with counter attacks. Don't worry about fairness, truth as long as you got the facts to back up your counterattacks. Above all let's not pretend that each side's views are equally valid.
- arnon1
August 12, 2012 at 6:22pm
I used to hope that Romney was, wink wink, really a technocratic pragmatist. But Romney's nomination of Paul Ryan, politically powerful in his own right, guarantees Romney's surrender to the ultra-Right agenda. Ryan can't be bottled up as a mere team player. Sort of like the Muslim Brotherhood's takeover of Egypt. The Trojan Horse's inside the gate.
- amidut
August 12, 2012 at 7:44pm
Never underestimate the ability of Republican conservatives to sell themselves (their very being, and deny deny their accomplishments) to the most extreme wing of their party if they thought it could gain them the "prize." McCain sounded reasonable till he picked Sarah Palin; farther back Bush, the elder, who knew the difference, once upon a time, between real and voodoo economics chose to run with the voodoo crowd for the sake of the prize. Romney reminds me of that Bush. The worst is that like that Bush, Romney has children to inflict on us for generations to come. He referred to Ayn Ryan as "one of his children."
- arnon1
August 12, 2012 at 8:57pm
Oh g*d help us (future Romneys...especially Ryan the Vampire - accccckkkkkkkkkkkkk) Anyway. This lust for power is frightening. I think they've been working on it since the FDR's days. Plus now the white folks are convinced that Christians are being persecuted and brown people, Jews, Muslims etc are Taking Over. And still there's that insane fear of socialism, as if "the individual" is destroyed by Medicare. Etc. Let us pray that reason prevails. I'm hoping Wisconsinites lead the way by rejecting Ryan and Romney and also, that they aren't successful, this time, in trying to pull off another Bush v Gore.
- Sophia
August 13, 2012 at 3:26am
Lulz. As if any level of cynicism from Romney, at this point, could be astounding to anyone.
- miceelf
August 13, 2012 at 7:22am
The way I understand it, much of the supposed $700 billion in Medicare cuts concerns government subsidies to supplemental health insurance companies--free taxpayer money given to supposed free-enterprise businesses. Medicare insurance companies are too cowardly to challenge the health insurance industry as it rips the taxpayers for hundreds of millions of duplicate tests and unnecessary procedures and operations and medications annually. The insurance companies are even in on some of these instances of fraud. Obama wants to clean some of this criminality up, but Republicans want people to make maximum profits by any means necessary. And if the Dems are ever able to cut off the free government money that insurance companies get, they, not the insurance companies will be blamed for the increased premiums and co-pays that seniors will pay. Supplemental insurance companies don't want to compete by challenging the criminals in the health industry. They just want that free taxpayer money that fattens their profits. Need we more proof that business cannot survive without the government in America? And any Republican who says otherwise is a sociopathic liar, a liar who is, of course, getting loads of free money in some way from the government for his business or businesses himself. Most politicians are hypocrites, but Republicans are the going-away winners in that category.
- magboy47.
August 13, 2012 at 11:35am
You guys. The problem is none of you understand the GOP inumermathematics and voodonomics used to buttress their Medicare charges. Please allow me to explain: I was spending $3500 to purchase fuel for my 1999 vehicle. In 2011 I purchase a new vehicle that is more fuel efficient AND a hybrid, that reduces my fuel cost by 50 percent. In other words, my annual fuel costs are now $1750. Do I use the $1750 in savings to purchase other goods and services? Hell no!!. I have an additional gas tank installed on my new car and fill it up. And because my new car is so-o-o-o fuel efficient I simply pour gas onto the ground. So enamored am I of spending $3500 per year that despite purchasing a car that provides better mileage I insist on using the saving to buy more gas. Get it? If the savings wrung out of Medicare are not plowed back into the program, well. . .that's cutting the program.
- tec619
August 13, 2012 at 11:46am
Very good point, because the Romney/Ryan soundbites I have seen simply say Obama is cutting $700 billion out of Medicare without even saying if it's this year, ten years, or what, let alone the other crucial details. There is so much room for half-truths and outright lies in dicussing this stuff in 30-second TV ads or arm- and flag-waving stump speeches. (Not that the 700 billion cut is necessarily the brightest idea in the ACA, by the way.)
- mlottman
August 14, 2012 at 1:26pm