Romney and Ryan Are Peddling Fear to Seniors by Grossly Distorting the Facts on Medicare
The GOP ticket says it wants to ‘protect and strengthen’ Medicare, when in fact its proposals would accomplish precisely the opposite
by Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, | August 26, 2012 4:45 AM EDT
It arrived 28 years after George Orwell predicted, but now we really have reached his 1984. In that famous novel, the banners in the state of Oceania read “War Is Peace,” “Freedom Is Slavery,” and “Ignorance Is Strength.” Winston Smith would have chuckled knowingly at the scene in mid-August in The Villages, the 98 percent white and heavily Republican central Florida planned community where Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan stood in front of a large banner reading: “Protect & Strengthen Medicare.
Ryan’s budget plan, which comparatively few Americans know much about, would do just the opposite. Health-care costs, most experts agree, would rise much faster than Ryan’s subsidies under the plan, meaning that seniors would be paying more out of pocket. There is also the fact that Romney’s own Medicare plan, to spend the $716 billion the Obama administration wants to save, would deplete the Medicare trust fund by 2016, requiring either tax hikes or dramatic benefit cuts. If that’s protect and strengthen, I’ll take abandon and weaken.
But the banner wasn’t even the biggest lie being served up at the Villages. The gold went to Ryan’s dredging up of the old “death panel” charge—the new health-care law, he said, would create a panel of experts empowered “to cut Medicare in ways that will lead to denied care for current seniors.”
Death panels were a lie then, in 2009, in that perfervid summer of town-hall hysteria, and were named the “Lie of the Year” by the independent fact-checking group Politifact. Others said much the same.
So how do Ryan and his supporters defend this claim? Because the new law does establish a body called the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). The way things are going in Washington, it will never even come into existence—more on that later. But if it does, this body of 15 presidentially appointed experts will indeed be given the responsibility to recommend Medicare cost savings, beginning most likely in 2018, if certain cost-reduction targets aren’t reached by then.
(More here.)
by Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, | August 26, 2012 4:45 AM EDT
It arrived 28 years after George Orwell predicted, but now we really have reached his 1984. In that famous novel, the banners in the state of Oceania read “War Is Peace,” “Freedom Is Slavery,” and “Ignorance Is Strength.” Winston Smith would have chuckled knowingly at the scene in mid-August in The Villages, the 98 percent white and heavily Republican central Florida planned community where Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan stood in front of a large banner reading: “Protect & Strengthen Medicare.
Ryan’s budget plan, which comparatively few Americans know much about, would do just the opposite. Health-care costs, most experts agree, would rise much faster than Ryan’s subsidies under the plan, meaning that seniors would be paying more out of pocket. There is also the fact that Romney’s own Medicare plan, to spend the $716 billion the Obama administration wants to save, would deplete the Medicare trust fund by 2016, requiring either tax hikes or dramatic benefit cuts. If that’s protect and strengthen, I’ll take abandon and weaken.
But the banner wasn’t even the biggest lie being served up at the Villages. The gold went to Ryan’s dredging up of the old “death panel” charge—the new health-care law, he said, would create a panel of experts empowered “to cut Medicare in ways that will lead to denied care for current seniors.”
Death panels were a lie then, in 2009, in that perfervid summer of town-hall hysteria, and were named the “Lie of the Year” by the independent fact-checking group Politifact. Others said much the same.
So how do Ryan and his supporters defend this claim? Because the new law does establish a body called the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). The way things are going in Washington, it will never even come into existence—more on that later. But if it does, this body of 15 presidentially appointed experts will indeed be given the responsibility to recommend Medicare cost savings, beginning most likely in 2018, if certain cost-reduction targets aren’t reached by then.
(More here.)
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