Mediscare Redux

[jgaffney]

Those pesky liberals are up to their old tricks again. This is from Stephen Moore:

Democrats spent the last week of Easter recess bashing the GOP on the Medicare reforms in the Paul Ryan budget, and Republicans tell me they are feeling the heat back home.

Republicans say the ploy, dubbed "Mediscare redux," harkens back to the mid-1990s. That's when House Republicans tried to reform the health insurance program for seniors, only to see a big push back from the senior lobby. Polls so far show less than 40% of voters supporting Rep. Ryan's plan, which includes "premium support" of up to $15,000 to allow seniors to purchase private plans. Anxious Republicans are now asking the House Republican leadership for talking points to counter the left's charge of "privatizing Medicare."

The only Republican so far to come out against the Ryan budget is Susan Collins of Maine. The scuttlebutt is that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid may try to force more defections by holding a vote to get Republicans on the record supporting Medicare cuts. Meanwhile, the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee is urging members to remind voters that the White House plan will lead to price controls and rationing of care. "So far Republicans are standing by the Ryan plan and defending it," one House leadership aide assures me. But "yes, they are worried about the polling," he adds.

One member who isn't backing away is Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona, who is running for Senate next year. In an interview, Mr. Flake says that he plans to go to Sun City and other retirement areas in Arizona to explain the fiscal necessity of the GOP cutbacks. "I think we need to reassure seniors on Medicare that this plan impacts future retirees, not them," he tells me. He also says that Republicans have to do a better job reminding seniors that "Medicare is going broke if we stick with the current system."

What is uncertain is whether those arguments will prevail with fidgety seniors who are susceptible to left-wing horror stories. Democrats have tripped up Republicans before with Medicare, and they're not liable to let up. The ads by unions showing Republicans pushing grandma down the stairs in her wheel chair are coming.

What's surprising is that, even though the President's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility came out with a similar plan to reduce spending on Medicare, the Democrats are acting like no reforms are necessary. Why haven't we heard a Democrat alternative?

[jgaffney]

Gov. Tim Pawlenty tweets:

@barackobama sorry to interrupt the European pub crawl, but what was your Medicare plan?

The short answer is that the Democrats don't have a plan. They are more than happy to demagogue any plan that the Republicans put forward, falling back on their same old "Scare Granny" tactics.

The long version is that Obama's healthcare plan cuts over $500 billion from Medicare, and transfers over $400 billion of it to fund Medicaid. That is the largest transfer of wealth, from those who contribute to Medicare to healthcare for the poor, in our country's history.

Meanwhile, the Dems still don't have a clue.

[jgaffney]

Veronique de Rugy explains the Party of Doing Nothing:

Yet, politics aside, Medicare has to be reformed. Anyone who still thinks that the Affordable Care Act has addressed Medicare’s insolvency problem hasn’t looked at the data closely. Based on the trustees’ report, despite a growing share of general revenue going to Medicare spending, the HI program will be insolvent by 2024 and registers $3 trillion in unfunded liabilities. And, of course, there’s only going to be so much money that can actually go to health care, because the economy is unlikely to stomach spending increases of that scale. The question is, how much can the economy stomach before it can’t anymore? When will voters decide that too much other spending is being squeezed out of the budget by health care and say they’ve had enough?

And things will be much worse than they look on paper. On that front, it is hard to underestimate the power of the the letter attached at the end of the Trustees’ report and signed by Richard Foster, the chief actuary of Medicare, explaining that the actuarial assumptions used in the report are unrealistic. As Yuval Levin correctly concludes: “The letter (which starts on page 265 of the document and pretty much makes the prior 264 pages moot) first says that the trustees were compelled to adopt some near-term assumptions that are highly implausible.” He copies a section of the letter:

For these reasons, the financial projections shown in this report for Medicare do not represent a reasonable expectation for actual program operations in either the short range (as a result of the unsustainable reductions in physician payment rates) or the long range (because of the strong likelihood that the statutory reductions in price updates for most categories of Medicare provider services will not be viable).

While Democrats disagree with Republicans about how to reform Medicare — as Bill Clinton says he does — they shouldn’t feel that they can just sit on their hands and do nothing. This is especially true in the face of the Trustees’ Report and its conclusion that, even in the best-case scenario, the ACA has failed to address Medicare funding issues. I suspect that this attitude is consistent with the fact that they didn’t pass a budget last year and are about to do it again this year, but it doesn’t make it okay. In the past, Democrats have spent a lot of time making fun of the Republicans for being the Party of No; Democrats are quickly becoming the Party of Doing Nothing.

But it's so much easier to scare Granny than it is to actually come up with a plan!