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Robbing Granny’s health care to pay for Obama’s pet project

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So, writes Charles Krauthammer in his thoughtful piece on the meaning of Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate, particularly as it relates to the discussion of Medicare in the current campaign.

The eagerness of Democrats to demagogue Medicare become manifest to me (once again) earlier this morning when on Facebook, I caught a graphic a friend had shared from the “Democrats” page on that social networking site.  With an image of a smiling Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder), they asked whether Republicans thought they could win on Medicare after voting to end it.  They so helped confirm what the sage pundit offered in his column that “The Democrats’ Mediscare barrage is already in full swing”:

Paul Ryan, it seems, is determined to dispossess Grandmother, then toss her over a cliff. If the charge is not successfully countered, good-bye Florida.

Republicans have a twofold answer. First, hammer home that their Medicare plan affects no one over 55, let alone 65. Second, go on offense. Point out that PresidentObama cuts Medicare by $700 billion to finance Obamacare.

It’s a sweet judo throw: Want to bring up Medicare, supposedly our weakness? Fine. But now you’ve got to debate Obamacare, your weakness — and explain why you are robbing Granny’s health care to pay for your pet project.

Read the whole thing.  The second half is particularly compelling — on how Ryan is emerging as the intellectual leader of the GOP.

Ryan’s emergence is a very good sign for the party, particularly for gay and lesbian sympathetic with the Reaganite economic messages, as it shows a focus on regulatory reform, fiscal responsibility and confidence in private enterprise and individual initiative not just as the engines which drive our economic, but the ideals which inform our society.

More on this anon.  I hope.

Comments

  3. Obamacare was written to benefit the uninsured, and guess who the biggest group of uninsured are — illegal aliens and recent immigrants (a group that now includes the so-called “dreamers” who are getting legal residency thanks to Obama’s imperial amnesty decree).

    Nothing says “fairness” like cutting benefits for Americans who paid into the system for years, in order to re-distribute the wealth to foreigners who have not.

  4. Suggestion: If you really want socialised medicine to work, then two out of Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare have to go, annihilated utterly, and the survivor has to be expanded to cover everyone for emergency needs. Then there is no cost shifting or duplication of bureaucracy. Anyone not happy with what that offers for their routine care is then free to purchase a private health care plan that offers what they want.

    This is roughly how it works in Australia, and it works reasonably well. The only doctors truly employed by the government are residents and interns in public teaching hospitals, whose decisions are made under the supervision of their attendings anyway. Everybody else bills the govt. for services rendered.

  7. Way to feed the propaganda machine Dan. Obama’s “cuts” are primarily to insurance companies, not to beneficiaries. And Paul Ryan’s plan relies on those same “cuts.”

    Comment by Another_Jeremy — August 17, 2012 @ 6:21 pm – August 17, 2012

    Sorry, childish bigot; your lies have already been debunked.

    First off, from your own article, your desperate spinning propagandists at PolitiFact were forced to admit this:

    Cutter said that Romney attacked Obama for cutting $700 billion out of Medicare, but “Paul Ryan protected those cuts in his budget.” Again, with this item we are not addressing whether they are cuts, but simply whether she is correctly characterizing Ryan’s plan.

    And here’s where the difference is explained.

    Long story short, Paul Ryan is reducing costs within Medicare and putting the cost reduction savings back INTO the Medicare trust fund to be used to pay future Medicare beneficiaries.

    Obamacare takes that money, which represents taxes paid in by seniors over a working lifetime in exchange for future care, blows it on people who have not paid into Medicare, and then double-counts the money — a trick which the Medicare actuary saw right through last year.

    Why do you think money should be taken from seniors because you’re too lazy to pay your own bills, Another_Jeremy?

  8. Yeah. Facts have been known to have a strong liberal bias. I didn’t think you minded recently when they called out an oft told lie about Romney? I guess they’re only hacks when they disagree with you? That’s a shame.

    But per your request.

    From factcheck.org.

    As we have written many times, the law does not slash the current Medicare budget by $500 billion. Rather, that’s a $500 billion reduction in the future growth of Medicare over 10 years, or about a 7 percent reduction in growth over the decade. In other words, Medicare spending would continue to rise, just not as much. The law stipulates that guaranteed Medicare benefits won’t be reduced, and it adds some new benefits, such as improved coverage for pharmaceuticals.

    Most of those savings come from a reduction in the future growth of payments to hospitals and other providers (not physicians), and a reduction in payments to private Medicare Advantage plans to bring those payments in line with traditional Medicare. (MA plans have been paid more per beneficiary than traditional Medicare.)

    And it assumes they actually happen. There’s good reason to think that some of those reductions won’t be implemented. The law calls for cuts in the future growth of reimbursement payments to hospitals and other health care providers — that accounts for $219 billion of the Medicare savings in the law. But Congress has consistently overridden similar scheduled cuts in payments to doctors.

    @ NorthDallasDumbass

    The healthcare bill does not add to the deficit. The CBO has said it would reduce the deficit numerous times and that the term “cuts” as it applies to Obama’s medicare plan is deliberately misleading. Did you not notice that the article you sited was in the opinion section of the WSJ?

  9. Factcheck-dot-org is hardly an objective source; they are a Pet Project of the left-wing Annenberg Foundation; which happens to have been the source of funding for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge; which gave money to Bill Ayers and Barack Obama back in his Community Organizing days. They are also major supporters of NPR/PBS, and we all know how fair and objective those guys are.

  10. Factcheck.org is a great example of leftie ‘magical thinking’. “Hey, its name has the words ‘fact check’! That must mean it is what it says! Our partisan hacks would NNNNEVVVER pretend to an objectivity that they lack! Let’s keep saying the name, it sounds so neat, Factcheck! Factcheck! Saying it will make it true!”

  12. Another_Jeremy, are you suggesting then that Obama included the Medicare cuts in his health tax and regulatory scheme (AKA Obamacare), knowing that the cuts would never kick in?

    That means that the program will then be an even bigger drain on the treasury. And that the Democrats deceived the American people in order to make the plan look affordable.

  13. The healthcare bill does not add to the deficit. The CBO has said it would reduce the deficit numerous times and that the term “cuts” as it applies to Obama’s medicare plan is deliberately misleading.

    Comment by Another_Jeremy — August 17, 2012 @ 7:20 pm – August 17, 2012

    Sorry. More lies from the desperate Obama propagandists, as this article nicely points out.

    hat if the law’s Medicare savings do pay off? Is the budget in the clear? Sorry, but no. The problem here is that long-held budgetary scoring conventions allow the savings to be “spent twice,” once on expanded health coverage, and again on shoring up Medicare. It’s all part of the way Medicare’s trust fund accounting works: A dollar becomes available and it is marked as being present in the “trust fund.” In the meantime, that dollar is spent on something else, but it is still recorded as being in the trust fund, despite having already been spent. Which means that eventually the governemnt will need to raise taxes, borrow, or cut some other spending in order to make up for that dollar that’s recorded as being present in the trust fund but isn’t.

    Again, the CBO agrees with this assessment: In December 2009, director Douglas Elmendorf explained that “to describe the full amount of [Medicare] HI trust fund savings as both improving the government’s ability to pay future Medicare benefits and financing new spending outside of Medicare would essentially double-count a large share of those savings and thus overstate the improvement in the government’s fiscal position.”

    Now watch as the screaming brat Another_Jeremy insists the CBO is lying. He can once again prove that he’s nothing more than a desperate hypocrite, just like his racist Barack Obama.

  14. Liberals don’t understand how the CBO works. The CBO bases calculations on the assumptions provided by the requester. They do not verify the the validity of the assumptions. Therefore, the CBO would say this is true :

    I have $100 in the bank. I assume I will have a 100% return every year for the next 10 years (the longest period of time the CBO will check). Therefore at the end of 10 years I will have $102,400 in the bank. The CBO will agree.

    The CBO only checks the math. They are glorified calculators. Garbage in, garbage out. ACA was full of garbage.