PLANK AUGUST 15, 2012
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Have you seen Mitt Romney’s new ad on Medicare? The video is below. The script goes like this:
You paid in to Medicare for years. Every paycheck. Now, when you need it, Obama has cut $716 billion from Medicare. Why? To pay for Obamacare. So now the money you paid for your guaranteed health care is going to a massive new government program that’s not for you. The Romney-Ryan plan protects Medicare benefits for today’s seniors and strengthens the plan for the next generation.
It’s not very subtle. And it’s not very true.
By now, you should know all about the hypocrisy of Romney attacking Obama for cutting Medicare. Paul Ryan put the same cuts in his budget plan. And while Romney has insisted he’d restore them, his budget doesn't have room for that. If he’s serious about his overall spending plan, then he’d surely have to cut Medicare by as much as Obama did. In fact, he’d probably have to cut it by even more. And that's just in the first ten years.
Still, the power of this ad is the appeal to senior citizens: Obama is taking your money and giving it somebody else. That’s why Romney and his allies keep saying that Obama “raided” Medicare. But, under the Affordable Care Act, a chunk of the money that comes out of Medicare goes right back into it. It helps seniors pay for prescription drugs, filling in the donut hole from Medicare Part D. It also allows seniors to get preventative care without co-pays, which means they can get an annual wellness visit, cancer screenings, and the like with no out-of-pocket costs. In the first half of this year, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, more than a million seniors have saved an average of $629 on their drug bills because of this assistance.
True, the majority of the money that the Affordable Care Act takes from Medicare doesn’t go directly to seniors. Instead, it goes to help non-elderly Americans get health insurance, either by enrolling in Medicaid or receiving tax credits to help pay for private insurance. The ad implies that transferring money in this way is wrong, but keep in mind that the money coming out of Medicare isn’t coming out of benefits. It’s primarily coming out of payments to health insurers and the rest of the health care industry, both of whom should be able to absorb it. (The government had been paying the insurers too much, according to multiple, independent analysis; cutting their subsidies was basically the same as cutting corporate welfare. The rest of the health care industry agreed to the cuts, in part because helping more people get insurance would create more paying customers for them.)
Maybe you think those trade-offs are fair and worthwhile. Maybe you don’t. But compare it to what Ryan and Romney have in mind. Ryan, again, has the same cuts in his budget. But he would rescind both the prescription drug assistance and the free preventative care. In other words, unlike Obama, Ryan would take benefits away from current retirees. And where would the money go? Ryan would it to offset other priorities in his budget, priorities that happen to include a very large tax cut for the rich.
So just to review:
Obama takes money away from the health care industry and uses it to help people pay their medical bills. Some of those people include seniors already getting help with their drug bills and free preventative care.
Ryan and, by implication, Romney takes the same money from the health care industry. But they also take away those new benefits for seniors, even as they find room in their tight budgets to cut taxes for the wealthy.
Like I said before, if somebody here is raiding Medicare, it’s not Obama.
If Republicans want to have a real debate about Medicare's future, they're welcome to argue that more competition will better hold down costs, that seniors really crave a much more competitive market, or that payment reforms to providers are likely to cause access problems. Those arguments don't persuade me, but at least they are defensible.
Better still, Republicans can make the honest case for their Medicare scheme—that a rock-solid guarantee of health benefits to seniors is not a commitment the country can afford to make anymore, so it's best to move to a system that limits the taxpayers' liability, even if that means the guarantee ends. I disagree with that, too, but it's ultimately an argument about values and priorities.
But this business about "raiding" Medicare? It's a naked appeal to selfishness and brazen misrepresentation of reality.
Update: Greg Sargent interviewed Rep. Chris Van Hollen, who said that Democrats are preparing to go on the offensive over higher costs for current retirees. It's about time.
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8 comments
Sorta like raiding white people's pockets to give you know who welfare. TV journalists need to stand up to this. MSNBC has of course, and Soledad O'Brien, other that that - ? I wonder how big an effect corporate time buys have on editorial policy? What does that say about the "free press?"
- Sophia
August 15, 2012 at 2:28pm
Romney is predictable. Any political liability Romney has will become an accusation against President Obama. Romney will destroy medicare, but he says it is the President who does that. Romney wants to cut top rates to benefit the wealthy, but Romney accuses the President of waging ugly class warfare. Romney attacks with distorted stitched together quotes, but it is the President who is negative. Romney provides a swiss cheese budget, but accuses the President of ducking the issues. And the President's virtues are also Romney's, by Romney's standards. When the auto bailout is successful, Romney takes credit. When Bin Laden is killed, "Oh, anyone would have done that."
- Nusholtz
August 15, 2012 at 2:50pm
Ed Kilgore, in his post on this subject, suggests that the purpose of the Romney-Ryan campaign about "cuts" to Medicare is intended to blow enough smoke on the subject that voters won't believe either side. A political campaign based on obfuscation. We expect politicians to make untrue statements from time to time, but with Romney almost every statement he makes is untrue. Even Republicans don't trust him as he changes positions on issues more often than he changes his underwear. Weren't we warned about such politicians when we were children and the country was in perpetual fear of the communist menace and their lies. Kilgore credits Cohn in his post. It would simplify matters if Kilgore would post more often in TNR. The other Jonathan too. But I suppose that spreading them around increases the hits and their influence.
- rayward
August 15, 2012 at 3:30pm
"You paid in to Medicare for years. Every paycheck." This is partly true, but misleading. My payroll taxes pay for my retired parents' SS and Medicare; when I retire, current workers will pay for mine. Of course, that's one reason SS and Medicare need adjustment, there aren't as many workers paying into the system as there are baby-boomers retiring. And another thing that sometimes gets lost is that unless your parents are pretty well off, reductions in retiree benefits have the potential to affect you. Either you'll help your parents with their expenses, or watch them suffer. That's what people did in the good old days before Social Security and Medicare (and what many middle-class and working-class people with retired parents do today, even with SS and Medicare). My Mom became a Democrat because of Reagan's Medicaid cuts, which not only made my parents a little poorer, but also made her mother's life a little more difficult than it should have been. But thank God for the upper-class tax cuts!
- GeoffG
August 15, 2012 at 4:00pm
Jonathon brings up an important point. Obama is taking free money away from capitalist enterprises, Medicare supplemental health insurance companies. But, instead of making their business more efficient by refusing to pay outrageous bills that include unnecessary tests and operations and prescriptions, they're wailing that they're not getting enough free subsidy money from the government. Fine, stand-alone capitalists they are! "Brave entrepreneurs" is their name, corporate welfare is their game. They are proof of how cowardly the human race can be, while claiming to be brave.
- magboy47.
August 15, 2012 at 4:34pm
I watched Maryland Rep.Chris Van Hollen (D) on CSPAN last night. He is an articulate defender of the ACA and explains how the Romney/Ryan plan will actually cost all seniors immediately in more costs from the doughnut hole and preventative care, which is where the $716 Billion is appropriately applied (but not in the Romney/Ryan plan) and the money comes from the excess payments for the overpriced Medicare Advantage plans. I came away with the thought that the President is better off this campaign after the Ryan pick because of the ACA.
- Nusholtz
August 16, 2012 at 7:40am
Funny that the title of the article asks who's raiding Medicare and shows a picture of a guy named Bush. Have to love that irony. Oh, and by the way, Bush is no longer a Raider.
- jm3245
August 16, 2012 at 10:05am
God. Dammit. All. First, "you paid into Medicare." Right. I'm a pretty high lifetime earner, with income way above the median family income for much of my working life. I've paid (including the employer portion), something South of $100 in Medicare taxes. If I work at my present salary through retirement I'll add another $50K or so at current rates. Add in a little imputed interest, and I may by the age of 65 have paid a total of $200K, and certainly less than $250K when I retire. Most people in my cohort won't get North of 1/2 of that. So, as a point of reference, my spouse had an eye problem quite common in folks in late middle age. Surgically correctable in most cases, but sometimes the surgeries need repeating. $100K+ in fees over 18 months to (kind of) preserve the vision in one eye. Or perhaps an even better example: my father spent all of his "pay in" to Medicare and any possible reasonable return on investment with just two knee replacement surgeries. If Medicare were a defined contribution plan ("you paid in") most beneficiaries would run out of benefit long before they ran out of real medical problems. Which leads to the real problem: either we figure out how to preserve life and ability in our older people more cheaply (which is what Obama is trying to do, although not very aggressively) or the kind of repugnant intergenerational conflict Romney's ad is intended to inflame is inevitable. Like it or not, the young cannot afford what the old have been promised - Romney/Ryan AND Obama are all right about that - and we have to do something about it. But starting a war between generations isn't the solution.
- IowaBeauty
August 16, 2012 at 5:23pm