WASHINGTON — For much of the past year, Republicans assailed President Obama for resisting the Medicare spending reductions they say are needed to both preserve health benefits for older Americans and avert a Greek-style debt crisis. Representative Paul D. Ryan, the House Republicans’ point man on the budget, has called the president “gutless.”“Obamacare cuts Medicare — cuts Medicare — by approximately $500 billion,” Mr. Romney has told audiences.That is a reprise of Republicans’ mantra of the 2010 midterm elections, which gave them big gains at both the state and federal levels and a majority in the House. Yet the message conflicts not only with their past complaint that Democrats opposed reining in Medicare spending, but also with the fact that House Republicans have voted twice since 2010 for the same 10-year, $500 billion savings in supporting Mr. Ryan’s annual budgets.“A pox on both their houses,” said Ron Haskins, a former Congressional staff member who is now a scholar of social programs and budgeting at the Brookings Institution. Democrats and Republicans “know they have to do something about Medicare, and then they harass each other about cutting Medicare. It’s so discouraging to me, but I’m a Republican, so I’m much more distraught about Republicans.”And, Mr. Haskins added, “$500 billion is modest compared to what Ryan would do.”Under Mr. Ryan’s budget, which Mr. Romney has supported but which has been blocked each year in the Senate, Medicare would not pay for the medical fees of future beneficiaries, as it currently does. Instead it would provide “premium support,” limited payments — vouchers, Democrats say — that beneficiaries could use to buy insurance policies in the private sector. And Medicaid, which increasingly goes toward nursing home care for older people, would become a capped block grant to states, forcing them to make significant cuts.Independent fact-checking groups have repeatedly knocked down the Republicans’ claims. “A discredited claim is making a comeback following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding most of the national health care reform law,” PolitiFact recently wrote in one such analysis.Democrats used the projected $500 billion in savings to help pay for expanding older people’s benefits. The health care law says that some preventive care services like mammograms must be free to patients, and it closed the “doughnut hole” in the Medicare prescription drug program, which had left many older people paying full price for prescriptions above a certain level.While Republicans have backed the spending reductions, even as they have attacked Mr. Obama and the Democrats for enacting them, they would end the new benefits.
right again engages in the hypocracy of their own type of political deception, tell you it's crap but vote in favor anyway, then blame the Pres. for doing it. is it just that they are so confused and shook up about losing in Nov. they speak in tongue's, because they are just as incoherent, in their dirt as they are in shoveling it.
make no mistake there will not be and never has been any cooperation from the right wing. only false accusations and the feeble attempts at trying to fool "we the people" into their corner, once you are there you are their's, and your fate is sealed.
