NYT editorial: Medicare and the Republicans

An overwhelming majority of older voters chose Republican Congressional candidates in Tuesday’s election. They were propelled in large part, we suspect, by distorted and inflammatory attack ads claiming that President Obama’s health care reforms would “gut” their Medicare coverage and implying that a Republican-controlled Congress would somehow rescue them.

Exit polls showed that in House races, voters aged 65 or older supported Republicans over Democrats by 59 percent to 38 percent, the biggest margin in any age group. A fifth of those voters rated health care their most important issue, and more than half said that Congress should repeal the whole health care reform law.

Those ads may have worked, but they were also misleading or dead wrong on several counts.

First, there is no way to slow the rise in Medicare costs — essential to addressing the deficit — without some changes in the Medicare program. And despite all the talk of gutting, what reform calls for is a reduction in the rate of increase in payments to health care providers, to encourage more efficiency, and a scale back in the unjustified subsidies to the private Medicare advantage programs. That change will only affect some 11 million of Medicare’s 46 million beneficiaries.

(More here.)