Obamacare Changed Everything: How Medicare Is No Longer The Dem’s Battering Ram

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Yuval Levin @ NRO:

Watching some of the Sunday shows yesterday and reading the usual suspects online, I was struck by how even knowledgeable liberals still do not understand what Obamacare has done to them. They have a sense that health care is no longer a good issue for them, that it might have cost them the 2010 elections and will hurt in 2012, but they haven’t grasped that Medicare — which for decades has been a trusty battering ram against Republicans in the contest for the votes of seniors and others — is also no longer their issue.

This becomes evident in part when you consider that the arguments the Democrats naturally fall back upon regarding Medicare are just false now. So for instance David Axelrod on CNN’s State of the Union referred to “Congressman Ryan’s idea that we should turn Medicare into a voucher program, shifting thousands of dollars ultimately onto the backs of seniors.” But that’s simply a lie — Ryan’s actual Medicare proposal(which Romney has backed) simply doesn’t shift costs to seniors.

But it’s even more evident when liberals try to confront what they themselves — the supporters of Obamacare — propose to do to Medicare. Thus we find Rachel Maddow like a deer in headlights when Rich Lowry asked her a simple question on Meet the Press yesterday: “Do you support $700 billion in cuts in Medicare over the next ten years?” Obamacare takes that amount out of the program and spends it on other things, especially its new exchange subsidies. Maddow literally refused to answer the question. At one point she even said she shouldn’t have to answer it because “I’m not running for anything,” even though her occupation, as I understand it, is to express her opinion. And in the end, her defense of the cuts (though she still never said she supported them) was that Paul Ryan’s budget actually keeps them in place, eliminating Obamacare’s spending but not its Medicare cuts.

It’s at least a bit odd for Democrats who say Ryan is the devil to defend President Obama’s raid on Medicare by saying Paul Ryan does the same thing — and what’s more, it’s not true. The Ryan budget puts those $700 billion into the Medicare trust fund, to shore up the program’s future and reduce the deficit, rather than spending the money on yet another new entitlement. And Mitt Romney proposes not to make those Obamacare cuts in the first place — keeping the money in Medicare’s operating budget and so leaving the program simply as it is for today’s seniors and starting his premium-support reform for younger Americans when they retire, beginning a decade from now. Both undo Obama’s raid on Medicare, and both support a plan to save Medicare from bankruptcy in the years ahead.

I don’t think Axelrod and Maddow were just setting out to lie exactly — it’s worse than that. Listening to them, it seemed as if they really hadn’t realized until now the situation they were in. They’re used to a certain order of things on Medicare and have not stopped to grasp what Obamacare has done to them. They assume it must be true that Republicans want to cut benefits and Democrats want to preserve them. But it’s not true, not anymore. You could see that panicked realization slowly rising in Maddow’s eyes as she was pressed.

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This article from the NRO just talks around the subject, and neither proves its claims nor disproves Obama’s claims about it. It’s just political rhetoric. Again, this writer (and it facilitator on this site) have proved themselves disingenuous by the incessant name calling of Obama that characterizes him as a liar, without any empirical evidence whatsoever.

@Liberal1 (objectivity):

Instead of simply offering criticism, Lib1, why don’t you counterpoint the article. What about it do you disagree with? Do you disagree that Obamacare steals over $700 billion from the Medicare funds to pay for other services in Obamacare? Do you disagree that the whole purpose of the IPAB is to cut costs (and therefore services) to Medicare in order to create a new entitlement in health care? Are you totally uninformed as to the specific purpose of the IPAB (an unelected 15 member panel)? So exactly what is it that you disagree with in the article? Be specific.

Now, I don’t see where the author calls Obama a liar, so that is just so much hyperbole on your part, which is typical for the liberal/progressive wing of American politics.

So show us how well informed you are by actually debating the merits of the article. If you can.