Happily, Romney and Ryan are doing just that – taking the
argument to voters and getting favorable responses (link). The simple reality is that the current
Medicare program is financially unsustainable and that the Ryan reform plan
only affects people now under 55. Obamacare,
on the other hand, already law, takes a huge chunk of money out of the
current Medicare program, affecting seniors right now on Medicare – a chunk
estimated by the government at about $450 billion when the law was first
enacted and now pegged by the Congressional Budget Office at over $700 billion (link).
That’s it -- Obamacare takes out
over $700 billion from the Medicare program seniors are currently on. On top of that, throw in Obamacare’s new
rationing board and the current law, enacted entirely by Democrats with no
Republican support, dramatically affects seniors right now. Once these facts sink in to more people it’s
Obama who will be rightly seen as pushing granny off the cliff.
The Democrat response to this unpleasant reality – more smears
and lies. Yuval Levin at National Review
Online (link):
Last week I spoke with a journalist
who covers health care who was marveling at the trouble the Democrats had
allowed themselves to get into on Medicare — thanks to Obamacare on the one
hand and the Romney-Ryan plan on the other, it’s suddenly Democrats who would
cut the program for current seniors but would fail to save it from collapse and
Republicans who would leave current seniors protected and stand a real chance
of saving Medicare (and the federal budget) in the long run. In their attempt to run away from this new
reality, the Democrats have found themselves pushed into a series of
increasingly implausible and unserious defenses and seemed to be losing ground
on Medicare, which they had hoped might be their strongest issue this year.
“So what will they do?” I asked
him. He didn’t hesitate: “They’ll just lie.” He thought they would revert to
the same story they have told for years — Republicans will increase seniors’
costs and destroy Medicare and Democrats won’t — and assume that people will
just believe it. That certainly made
sense, and we now know he was right. On Saturday, the Obama campaign released
this ad attacking the Romney Medicare proposal. The ad doesn’t walk some sort
of narrow line between misleading and deceiving, it’s just simply a pack of
lies from top to bottom....
....Those are all the claims in the
ad, and they are all false. At least as striking, though, is what the ad
doesn’t mention. It doesn’t mention that the Romney Medicare proposal would
leave current seniors entirely unaffected or that it would provide a guaranteed
comprehensive benefit to future seniors through a premium-support system. It
doesn’t mention that the Democrats cut $716 billion from Medicare in this
decade to spend on Obamacare, and did so largely through increased price
controls, which are the most counterproductive way to reduce short-term costs
since they tend to drive up long-term costs and undermine efficiency, quality,
and access. It doesn’t say that Obamacare subjects Medicare to a board of 15
rationers who will decide which benefits are worthwhile and which are not — for
both current and future seniors. In other words, the [Democrat] ad pretends
Obamacare does not exist, ignores the reality of the Romney Medicare proposal,
and presents a series of flatly untrue claims in its place.
Now, people can debate the Ryan proposal and whether it would ultimately save Medicare or not, or suggest (implausibly) that in the long run it will take as much out of Medicare as Obamacare now does, but one cannot deny that Obamacare is taking $700+ billion out of Medicare as we speak. Florida will be the laboratory this election on whether Obama, Slow Joe Biden, and the
other Democrats can piss on seniors and convince them that it’s a sun shower with a
rainbow at the end.
John M Greco
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