Many spending hawks in Washington had hoped that Mitt Romney’s
selection of leading deficit warrior Paul Ryan as his running mate would open a
more candid and sober debate about cutting federal spending.
But the tone of the campaign
rhetoric on Medicare — with each party accusing the other of working to destroy
the program — has raised concern among longtime deficit-reduction advocates
that neither party is preparing the public for what they see as the demographic
imperative of curbing Medicare spending.
On Wednesday, Romney accused
President Obama of siphoning Medicare dollars to fund his 2010 health-care law,
and he promised to restore that money if elected.
Obama countered that he has
strengthened the Medicare program and that his Republican challenger would end
it.
The back-and-forth worried
Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan group
that seeks an end to deficit spending. He said both candidates are undermining
efforts to convince the public of the long-term need for Medicare reductions.
“I don’t think it’s off to a very good start, if what we’re looking
for is a good, substantive debate on deficit reduction,” he said of the Ryan
phase of the campaign. “There are good, legitimate debates we could have about
the best way to control Medicare spending. But it quickly descends into charges
of robbery and murder.”
Budget experts expect Medicare
spending to balloon in the coming decades, as 10,000 baby boomers will turn 65
and become eligible for benefits each day for the next 20 years. The program’s
rapid growth is a leading driver behind the growth of the federal deficit.
A complex debate has been
underway about how to provide seniors the care they need at a cost the
government can afford.
But several deficit experts
said they worry that the escalating campaign rhetoric about which side is
seeking Medicare cuts will damage both parties’ ability to come up with a
compromise to reduce costs.
“Everyone knows that Medicare in its current state is unsustainable.
There’s not a serious person out there who argues otherwise,” said Steve Bell,
economic policy director at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “And we are now
starting to have an emotional, distorted, propagandistic debate about it.”
Cost-cutting measures
The Democrats’ health-care law
aims to curb Medicare spending by reducing payments to hospitals and other
providers — not beneficiaries — in part as a trade for reducing hospitals’
costs by cutting millions from the ranks of the uninsured.
In the spending plan he
authored as chairman of the House Budget Committee, Ryan proposed to end the
health-care law. But he assumed the same cost reductions in Medicare spending
as a way to reduce the deficit.
On Wednesday, Romney promised
that if elected, he would restore the money to the program as a way to bolster
it for current retirees.
“My commitment is, if I become president, I’m going to restore that
$716 billion to the Medicare trust fund so that current seniors can know that
trust fund is not being raided,” Romney said on CBS News’s “This Morning.”
“And we’re going to make sure and get Medicare on track to be solvent
long-term, on a permanent basis.”
Those comments came after
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said Sunday on NBC’s
“Meet the Press” that if anyone has “blood on their hands” in the Medicare
debate, it is Obama. “He’s the one that’s destroying Medicare,” he said.
Bixby said Ryan’s budget
position is “defensible,” plowing cuts from Medicare into deficit reduction.
But speaking on conservative
radio host Sean Hannity’s show on Wednesday, the Wisconsin congressman joined
the chorus in pledging to fight the cuts.
“We’re going to have this debate, and we’re going to win this
debate,” Ryan said. “It’s the president who took $716 billion . . . from the
Medicare program to spend on Obamacare. That’s cuts to current seniors that
will lead to less services for current seniors. We don’t do that. We actually
say end the raid and restore that, so that those seniors get the benefits today
that they organize their lives around.”
Bixby said Romney has muddied
efforts to curb red ink with his promise to restore the money. “I’m trying to
figure out how you reduce Medicare spending without reducing Medicare
spending,” he said.
Many Republicans think cutting
payments to providers will succeed only in making it unaffordable for doctors
to treat Medicare patients, resulting in fewer medical outlets willing to
accept the federal health insurance.
In a statement, Romney
campaign spokesman Andrea Saul said that “twisting the screws on providers
won’t hold down costs, it just jeopardizes seniors’ access to care and
threatens their benefits.”
Instead of relying on “on
administrative price controls,” she said, Romney will “introduce choice and
competition in the system.”
Attack, counterattack
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former
director of the Congressional Budget Office and adviser to 2008 Republican
presidential nominee John McCain, said Romney and Ryan must make a compelling
case for the need to reduce Medicare spending for future seniors. But first, he
said, they must neutralize the Democratic attacks on Ryan’s plan as one that
will throw seniors off Medicare rolls.
Obama pressed that assault
Wednesday in a speech in Dubuque, Iowa. His own reforms, he said, will
strengthen Medicare by reducing “wasteful spending”; benefits for seniors are
not cut “by a dime.” However, he said, a proposal in Ryan’s budget plan — which
would offer future retirees a capped payment to purchase private insurance —
“ends Medicare as we know it.”
The Bipartisan Policy Center’s
Bell, a former staff director for the Senate Budget Committee under Sen. Pete
V. Domenici (R-N.M.), said he fears that Obama will win by demonizing efforts
to curb Medicare growth, making it harder to find common ground on the issue in
a second term.
“My sense is that this is going to be a referendum, all right. But
for people like me, who are really concerned about debt trends, the outcome
will be a step backwards,” he said.
Adam Fletcher, a spokesman for
the Obama campaign, said that the health-care law added eight years to the
solvency of Medicare and that further cuts proposed by Obama in this year’s
budget would add two more.
“The president has done a lot more than just talk about making
Medicare more sustainable,” he said.
Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), who
has been warning of the dangers of a rising tide of debt for years, said the
modern political process makes it nearly impossible for politicians to have a
rational policy debate in the heated final weeks of a national campaign.
“We’re trying to solve some of the most complex policy dilemmas in
history with an increasingly ADD nation,” he said. “It’s an in¬cred¬ibly tough
challenge.”
But he said both parties
should strive for a do-no-harm approach, in which they don’t allow their
rhetoric to be so strident that they cannot make tough choices after the
election.
Cooper said the current
campaign is “not just worrying” him on the do-no-harm measure.
“It’s terrifying me,” he said.
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