From Time’s Mark Halperin’s imagined To-Do List for Mitt Romney (See Mitt Run By Mark Halperin – TIME):
Fight Medicare to a draw–carefully. Never has a Republican campaign been as well positioned to become the preserver of health care options and quality care for the elderly. And yet Romney could lose the race on this issue alone. He picked the fight; now he has to sharpen his message and engage …
As we noted, yesterday the New York Times reports on Romney’s plans for Medicare:
But repealing the savings, policy analysts say, would hasten the insolvency of Medicare by eight years — to 2016, the final year of the next presidential term, from 2024.
*facepalm*
Halperin is just stunningly inept. He is the Baghdad Bob of political analysis. That this cat has a job — multiple jobs, actually, including the weekend bobblehead shows — is shocking.
Discuss
8 Comments . Leave a comment below.This administration signed a law that set up a new program by taking funds from Medicare, and got HAMMERED for that in 2010, and then preemptively and publicly conceded further Medicare cuts in the fruitless “negotiations” over the debt ceiling.
Obama is vulnerable on Medicare, and the issue could be a wash, Ryan budget notwithstanding.
back in the olden days, that Dems would demagogue Medicare by characterizing “slowing the rate of growth” as “cuts”.
http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/medicare_and_the_716_billion_b.php?page=all&print=true
Shoe’s on the other foot. It was BS then (as far as it went) and it’s BS now.
But it sure looked to me like the Affordable Care Act reduces benefit payments on private Medicare Advantage plans and the reimbursement rates for hospitals, but the cost of the services isn’t going to change. That means less services: i.e., a cut. Indeed, this cut is what absolutely slaughtered Democrats in 2010.
Then, the argument seems to be that the Ryan plan adds to the debt, specifically because his budget ADDS seven hundred billion dollars back into Medicare. But then you have to admit that these funds are added back because the plan is to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would repeal the cut.
In short, I am concerned that for all of the crowing about how Ryan kills Romney in Florida, the Medicare issue is far too messy now for a clean kill. Which is why the AARP set, which actually votes, is now split rather than being firmly locked in the Democrats’ corner.
I don’t really know what you mean by “the AARP set,” but AARP itself is quite clear on its view of the Ryan budget:
The organization is careful to not endorse candidates, but since Romney has explicitly endorsed the Ryan budget and its author, it’s not hard to read between the lines. The organization is also clear on the so-called benefit cuts:
There are three players in the game: Health insurers, health providers, and seniors. If medical costs are to be reduced (or if increases in medical costs are to be slowed), one of those three players will be either receiving less or paying more.
In the GOP/Ryan plan, seniors take the hit. In the Obama plan, health providers and health insurers share the burden.
In my view, because health insurers are the furthest removed from the process of providing or receiving care, they should take the hit.
The gap between the demagoguery of ALL sides and reality is disheartening.
But hard to fit in a 30 second spot.
I’m not sure that it divides so neatly into three pots. When the providers get paid less, the doctor who wants to spend time with each patient will no longer accept Medicare, because he can’t make a living thereby. Pure Medicare patients will have another doctor, who, though he speeds along, is at least a doctor. Thus, everyone has at least some care, which was the point. But this necessarily means that someone will have to leave the nice, thorough “full service” doc– and that makes for lousy optics in the short term (like November).
The whole goal here, for Romney, is that people will just tune out from the shouting and medicare will be taken off the table as an issue. That’s why they don’t really care if their claims about Obama “stealing” the 700 billion from the program are true or not. Just a loud argument serves the purpose.
It also fits with an effective campaign tactic employed by both sides which is to state a ridiculous claim and rely on confusion after that.
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