Karl Rove's "Mediscare" Hypocrisy

REMINGTON SHEPARD/Media Matters For America

Karl Rove hypocritically referred to an ad highlighting how a recent House Republican budget would harm seniors who rely on Medicare as "Mediscare" demagoguery, ignoring his own PAC's misleading Medicare-based attack on a Democrat during the 2012 election cycle.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee released ads on April 1 highlighting the ramifications of the fiscal year 2014 budgetproposed by Republican Rep. Paul Ryan (WI) and passed by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. The ads accurately claim that the budget would cut Medicare and harm seniors.

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities recently found that the Ryan budget would "cut Medicare spending by $356 billion," as well as "shift substantial costs to Medicare beneficiaries," and could leave many 65 and 66 year olds without health insurance.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, however, Karl Rove dismissed this ad as "demagoguery" and "deeply dishonest":

The midterm election is still 19 months away, but for some it's never too early for demagoguery. And so this week the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee launched a new "Mediscare" ad. The targets are 17 Republican congressmen who supported the House budget framework that includes Medicare reforms.

The ad has menacing music, doomsday predictions and a tagline that these GOP congressmen voted for "a radical vision for America" that guts Medicare. The spot is deceitful but still deserves a swift, powerful rebuttal. Even a deeply dishonest attack on Medicare, if unrefuted, can do damage.

In his critique of the "Mediscare" ad, Rove ignored his own political group's Medicare-based attack ad. American Crossroads ran a misleading ad during the 2012 election cycle attacking Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson (FL) for supposedly harming seniors by voting for "massive cuts to Medicare" to the tune of $700 billion by voting for health care reform.

Contrary to the ad's claim, health care reform did not cut Medicare. As an August 2012 ABC News postexplained, the supposed "cuts" to Medicare was actually the slowing of Medicare's future growth by "getting rid of fraud and ending overpayments to private insurance companies." Gail Wilensky, a former administrator of the Medicare program under President George H. W. Bush, made clear in a June 2012 Bloomberg article that this growth control would not result in "reductions in the Medicare benefits promised in the law."

Romney Adviser Says GOP Would Extend Medicare’s Solvency By Raising The Eligibility Age

By Aviva Shen/Think Progress

Earlier this week, Mitt Romney pledged torestore Obamacare’s savings in the Medicare program — a move that would move up the insolvency date of the program’s trust fund from 2024 to 2016.

On Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asked Romney senior adviser Ed Gillespie how the campaign would extend the life of the program if the Romney-Ryan reforms won’t kick in until 2023, long after Medicare reached insolvency. Gillespie replied by insisting that a Romney administration would raise the age eligibility to 67:

WALLACE: But the problem is, those reforms don’t kick in until 2023. It doesn’t affect any seniors or anybody close to being a senior. But that doesn’t solve the Medicare part A problem which kicks in in 2016. What are you going to do to keep solvent between 2016, after you have repealed Obamacare, and 2023?

GILLESPIE: Governor Romney supports increasing over time bringing Medicare eligibility in line with the Social Security retirement age … The Congressional Budget Office says assumptions about the Medicare trust fund being solvent through 2024 under the Obamacare proposal is unrealistic.

Watch it:

Numerous studies have shown that booting 65- and 66-year-olds from Medicare would in facthave only modest savings, while raising health care costs across the board for seniors. Though Medicare spending itself would be reduced by 5 percent, the seniors taken out of the system would then have to turn to employers, other government programs and the states, increasing costs. As a result many of the people who would otherwise have enrolled in Medicare would face higher premiums for health insurance, higher out-of-pocket costs for health care, or both.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) estimates costs could “total $11.4 billion — twice the net savings to the federal government” in 2014 alone. Medicare’s market power would inevitably suffer as well:

Raising the Medicare age would shift costs to most of the 65- and 66-year olds who would lose Medicare coverage, to remaining Medicare beneficiaries, to employers that provide coverage for their retirees, and to states. These cost increases would, in total, more than offset the savings to the federal government. Moreover, by further shrinking Medicare’s share of the health insurance market, raising Medicare’s eligibility age would reduce its market power and weaken its ability to serve as a leader in controlling health care costs in the future.

Beginning in 2023, Ryan’s FY 2013 budget would “raise the eligibility age for Medicare — now 65 — by two months per year until it reaches age 67 in 2034.” But if Romney hopes to extend the life of the trust fund by booting younger seniors off of the program, he would have to institute the policy sooner and faster than Ryan has proposed.

Whiteboard Face Off: ThinkProgress Takes On Romney’s Medicare Madness

By Igor Volsky/Think Progress

Mitt Romney offered a white board presentation during a news briefing in South Carolina on Thursday morning that sought to untangle the campaign’s contradictory message about Medicare. Over the last week, Romney and Ryan have twisted themselves into a pretzel to attack President Obama for “stealing” $716 billion from Medicare, while trying to explain why Paul Ryan included the savings in his FY 2013 budget. Romney had previously pledged to sign the document into law.

During the presentation, Romney tried to lay out the differences. Obama takes the money out of seniors’ Medicare Advantage plans and cuts payments to providers, causing some to lose his coverage, he argued. The program’s trust fund would go bankrupt by 2024, under Obama, and seniors would lose access to the care they need. His plan, alternatively, would preserve the program for current retirees and keep it solvent indefinitely.

ThinkProgress explains why this is wrong:

The Obamacare savings slow the growth of Medicare over the next decade by, in part: eliminating overpayments to private insurers in Medicare Advantage, reforming provider payments to encourage greater efficiency, tying reimbursements to improvements in economic productivity, and reducing fraud and abuse. The law does not impact patient benefits.

As a result of these savings, “growth in spending will be restrained” and the life of the Medicare trust fund is expanded by eight years, the government estimates. Sixteen millionseniors are also benefiting from the savings by receiving preventive benefits without deductibles or co-pays and saving more than $3.9 billion on prescription drugs.

Should Romney restore the $716 billion — and unless he institutes other yet to be specified reforms — we would move back to the old system of overpaying private insurers and providers. He’d be re-inserting inefficiency back into the system, jeopardizing the benefits that seniors are currently enjoying, and shrinking the solvency of the Medicare trust fund from 2024 under current law to 2016.

POLL: Democrats Have Advantage In Medicare, Contraception Debates

By Amanda Peterson Beadle/Think Progress

More people agree with Democrats that the U.S. needs to maintain a defined set of benefits in traditional Medicare, according to a new survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Seventy percent of respondents, including 53 percent of Republicans, said they want to keep Medicareas it is. This come ahead of the introduction of the Republicans’ proposed budget later this spring, which is likely to include Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) plan to transform the program into a “defined contribution” structure that would provide seniors with a voucher to purchase insurance from an exchange of private plans.

On contraception coverage, 63 percent of people agree with President Obama’s position that employer-provided insurance plans should cover it at no cost. Most people also agreed with the Democrats’ agrument that the contraception debate is about women’s rights, and 49 percent said they most trusted Democrats on the issue, with 33 percent saying they trusted Republicans.

The Senate will vote on the Blunt amendment, which would undermine the contraception mandate by allowing any employer to deny coverage of health services to their employees on the basis of their personal moral objections.

Romney: Medicare May Not Be Guaranteed Every Year, If I’m President

By Igor Volsky/Think Progress

Mitt Romney clarified his plan to partially privatize the Medicare program during aninterview with the Washington Examiner’seditorial board Wednesday morning, suggesting that he would allow Congress to vote on the amount of “premium support” credits (or vouchers) seniors receive to buy health care coverage every year. Broadly speaking, like Paul Ryan, Romney seeks to gradually privatize the Medicare program for future enrollees by shifting seniors into private coverage and issuing everyone a “voucher” with which to purchase insurance. The plan also preserves the traditional Medicare option — known as fee-for-service — and seniors would be given a choice between using their vouchers towards the existing Medicare program or private insurance.

“[L]ower income seniors will receive more generous support to ensure that they can afford coverage,” but the government’s vouchers won’t keep up with premium increases and as a result, seniors who cannot afford to pay anything above the government contribution may be stuck in cheaper and perhaps lower quality health plans that contract with lower quality providers or cover fewer expensive tests and procedures. During today’s interview, Romney reiterated that the voucher would not grow with health care spending and hinted that Congress would be responsible for approving voucher increases annually:

KLEIN: Exactly. You know now, obviously a key question that’s going to determine whether this plan puts Medicare in a sustainable fiscal trajectory is the rate of growth of those support payments. Would the value — under your plan would the value of those subsidies grow at the standard measure of consumer inflation, or the rate of medical inflation?

ROMNEY: [...] One is Congressional action — deciding as Hoover, Heritage and Brooking said a few years ago, we just have a budget. And every year don’t call this an entitlement. Every year pass a budget for how much the total subsidy is going to be. And that would then set the limit of how much each person is going to receive. Obviously, I’ve mentioned that people of lower income would get a higher subsidy than people of higher income. [...]

KLEIN: So you are saying, just to clarify, you would leave it up to Congress to determine it each year or that’s one idea that –

ROMNEY: That’s one, that’s one principle. I think the key principle is this: It’s not going to grow at an open-ended rate driven only by medical inflation.

Congress already appropriates funding for Medicare, but since the program has long-term implications for our country, that spending is classified as mandatory, meaning that lawmakers do not vote for it every year. Here, Romney is proposing placing federal funding for seniors’ health care at the whims of what many see as a dysfunctional body, creating great uncertainty for America’s neediest and most vulnerable population.

Romney Offers More Details On Medicare Plan: ‘We’re Going To Give People Vouchers’

By Igor Volsky/Think Progress

Mitt Romney has praised Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) plan to privatize Medicare for future enrollees as making “important strides in the right direction” and promised that his own proposal “will differ” but “share those objectives.” During a discussion with the editorial board of the Las Vegas Review Journal earlier this week, Romney revealed that he would give seniors “vouchers” to enroll in private managed care plans, but preserve the traditional CMS-sponsored coverage as an option:

ROMNEY: You have a program like Paul Ryan has proposed, which says we’re going to give people vouchers to let them choose among private plans. I would not at the same time would want to remove the option for people who have standard Medicare. But I would probably move to a more managed care approach even in Medicare itself.

Watch it:

The proposal is a small tweak to the Ryan approach and will only save the federal government money by shifting costs to seniors rather than lowering national health care spending. Managed care — as it currently exists as an option through Medicare Advantage — lacks the bargaining power of the traditional Medicare program and has produced only limited savings. In fact, private plans are receiving a subsidy from the federal government to offer additional benefits, but are often less efficient and charge more for the same coverage. That means, as the Congressional Budget Office has concluded, “under the proposal, most elderly people would pay more for their health care than they would pay under the current Medicare system.” “[T]he beneficiary’s share in 2030 would be 68 percent under the proposal” but only “25 percent” under current law. Their share will only increase over time, since the “voucher” Romney is proposing will probably not keep up with health care costs.

Romney’s one modification — maintaining traditional Medicare as an option — is significant but also problematic. Analysts who have studied similar plans, argue that younger and healthier beneficiaries would be encouraged to leave the traditional program for managed care, creating a severe adverse selection spiral for seniors who remain in traditional Medicare. Henry Aaron — who developed the concept with Robert Reischauer in 1995 — has since walked away from the proposal, arguing that the Affordable Care Act may push Medicare to use its leverage to create much more substantial savings.

Republicans look to privatize Medicare

By Sahil Kapur

Medicare, Social Security 'a cruel Ponzi scheme': GOP conference chairman

WASHINGTON – House Republicans would support a plan to privatize Medicare in their annual budget, a member of the GOP leadership said.

Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling, the House Republican Conference Chairman and second-ranked GOP member of the budget committee, made the revelation during a panel discussion, according to the National Journal.

"Unless you deal with Medicare, unless you go into Medicaid, unless you deal with Social Security for future generations—programs that were a great comfort to my grandparents and parents are morphing into a cruel Ponzi scheme for my 8-year-old daughter and my 7-year-old son," Hensarling said.

Social Security and Medicare are self-financed retirement security programs that taxpayers are required to pay into throughout their working lives.

The to-be-proposed GOP budget measure closely mirrors a provision in the high-profile "roadmap" put forth by budget committee chairman Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), which would turn Medicare into a program of vouchers whose value gradually diminishes over time, and largely privatize Social Security.

"You can’t get there from here without those kinds of reforms," Hensarling said, "so I expect it to be in the budget, I hope it’ll be in the budget, and I would certainly support it."

A Gallup poll released Wednesday found that 61 percent of the public opposes cutting Medicare, as opposed to just 38 percent in favor.

After regaining control of the House this month, top Republicans championed Ryan's "roadmap," which would end Social Security and Medicare in their present forms and eventually turn them over to the private sector.

Democratic leaders shot back with a forceful posture on the popular safety-net programs.

“Republicans are trying to carry out their plan to end Social Security and Medicare," said Jon Summers, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). "In public, Republicans are trying to distance themselves from this extreme plan because they know hard-working Americans don’t want to see Social Security and Medicare ended. But they should stop trying to hide the ball, and just come out and say what has become perfectly clear: that ending Social Security and Medicare is now the official position of the Republican Party."

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the third-ranking Democrat in the chamber, also chimed in.

"Anyone who doesn't think privatization will mean severe cuts to Medicare benefits, I have a bridge I'd like to sell them," he said, according to The Associated Press. "Privatization will make the cuts previously proposed by either party look tame."

Beck: We Should ‘Just Abolish Medicare’

By Alex Seitz-Wald Yesterday, Senate Democrats working on health care reform reached a compromise on the public option that will create a network of nonprofit insurers and allow Americans between the ages of 55 and 64 to buy into Medicare. The right has hypocritically opposed a government-run public-option while simultaneously defending Medicare. On his radio show today, Fox News host Glenn Beck called Medicare what it is — a “government-run health care plan.”

Beck attacked the new compromise and proposed a simple solution of his own — “abolish Medicare”:

CO-HOST: This is unbelievable, because the whole thing with the public option, is we were saying this is going to be like Medicare, they just want to make a big — make another Medicare program. And then they said no, public option is just competition.

BECK: And, wait wait wait. And I also said why don’t you just abolish Medicare, because it’s so wildly corrupt and out of control. It’s so inefficient, it is so bad and there’s $47 billion in suspected wrong payments, okay, in Medicare. So what are they saying — now remember, what we’re going to do — the compromise is we’re going to expand Medicare. That way there won’t be a public option, we’ll just — which doesn’t make any sense — we’re going to expand Medicare.

Listen:

Medicare is actually more efficient than private health insurance and would be better at controlling costs than weaker public option plans. And while Republicans strongly opposed Medicare when it was created under President Johnson, it has become popular over time. When Rep. Anthony Wiener (D-NY) introduced an amendment to eliminate Medicare in July — urging conservatives to “put-up or shut-up” about their objection to government-run health care. Not a single member of Congress voted in favor.

Moreover, Medicare is hugely successful. Before it came into being, more than one in four seniors lacked health care and a third lived in poverty. Now every American over 65 has access to quality care. A Commonwealth Fund study found that people with Medicare “report fewer problems obtaining medical care, and less financial hardship due to medical bills, and higher overall satisfaction with their coverage,” compared to people with employer-provided care. 56 percent of Medicare beneficiaries rate their coverage a 9 or 10 on a scale of 10 while only 40 percent with private insurance do so.