The Medicare Distortions

[Geee]

National Review:

In the last three weeks, President Obama and his apologists have been incredulous that the Romney-Ryan campaign would have the audacity to attack them over Medicare. How dare they? That’s what we do, not them!

As my colleague Yuval Levin has already explained, these Democrats don’t seem to realize that Obamacare changed everything. The new health-care law cut Medicare by $716 billion over a decade to partially finance the cost of expanding entitlement benefits for other Americans. Put simply, Medicare was squeezed to grease the way for the president’s main first-term ambition — enactment of a government takeover of American health care. That’s a fact, and it’s one that doesn’t sit well with many voters, especially seniors. Romney and Ryan are helpfully reminding the electorate about this matter, as they should.

Those coming to the president’s aid in this debate — and the usual suspects have certainly stepped up to the plate, including Paul Krugman, Peter Orszag, Laura D’Andrea Tyson, and most recently former president Bill Clinton — have offered up a number of different arguments on the president’s behalf, some based on defending his record, and others aimed at changing the subject to the supposed defects of the Romney-Ryan Medicare reform plan. All of these arguments have been thoroughly rebutted elsewhere (see especially Grace-Marie Turner debunking Clinton’s claims and Senator Jim DeMint and his staff at the Joint Economic Committee doing likewise). But because the Democratic propaganda machine is now in high gear, and will remain so all the way to November 6, it is important to confront these arguments often to prevent them from becoming conventional wisdom.

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Defenders of the president’s record generally begin by admitting that, well, yes, the Medicare cuts in Obamacare do total $716 billion over ten years. But they then say that these cuts won’t do any harm because they come at the expense of insurance companies and waste in the health-care sector, not benefits for seniors. This is demonstrably false. One of the largest cuts in Obamacare is in the payments made to Medicare Advantage plans. Today, some 13 million seniors are signed up with these plans. Very often, these are seniors with modest incomes who are attracted to the better coverage provided by Medicare Advantage, including reduced cost-sharing, without the expense of a Medigap plan. The Medicare trustees expect that the Obamacare cuts will drive 4 million seniors out of Medicare Advantage by 2018. This is a direct violation of the president’s tattered promise that, under Obamacare, Americans who like their current insurance plans would get to keep them.