By Angie Drobnic Holan and Bill Adair
Politico, December 20, 2011
Republicans muscled a budget through the House of Representatives in April that they said would take an important step toward reducing the federal deficit. Introduced by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the plan kept Medicare intact for people 55 or older, but dramatically changed the program for everyone else by privatizing it and providing government subsidies. Democrats pounced.
• Just four days after the party-line vote, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee released a Web ad, saying seniors will have to pay $12,500 more for health care “because Republicans voted to end Medicare.”
• Rep. Steve Israel of New York, chairman of the DCCC, appeared on cable news shows and declared that Republicans voted to “terminate Medicare.”
• A Web video from the Agenda Project, a liberal group, said the Ryan plan would leave the country “without Medicare” and showed a Ryan look-alike pushing an old woman in a wheelchair off a cliff.
• And just last month, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi sent a fundraising appeal that read, “House Republicans’ vote to end Medicare is a shameful act of betrayal.”
PolitiFact debunked the Medicare charge in nine separate fact-checks rated False or Pants on Fire, most often in attacks leveled against Republican House members.
Now, PolitiFact has chosen the Democrats’ claim as the 2011 Lie of the Year.
At times, Democrats and liberal groups were careful to characterize the Republican plan more accurately. Another claim in the ad from the Agenda Project said the plan would “privatize” Medicare, which received a Mostly True rating from PolitiFact. President Barack Obama also was more precise with his words, saying the Medicare proposal “would voucherize the program, and you potentially have senior citizens paying $6,000 more.”
With a few small tweaks to their attack lines, Democrats could have been factually correct, said Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “I actually think there is no need to cut out the qualifiers and exaggerate,” he said.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1211/70705.html
And…
Long-Term Analysis of a Budget Proposal by Chairman Ryan
Congressional Budget Office
April 5, 2011
Among other changes, the proposal would convert the current Medicare program to a system under which beneficiaries received premium support payments – payments that would be used to help pay the premiums for a private health insurance policy and would grow over time with overall consumer prices. The change would apply to people turning 65 beginning in 2022; beneficiaries who turn 65 before then would remain in the traditional Medicare program, with the option of converting to the new system.
Under the proposal, most elderly people would pay more for their health care than they would pay under the current Medicare system. For a typical 65-year-old with average health spending enrolled in a plan with benefits similar to those currently provided by Medicare, CBO estimated the beneficiary’s spending on premiums and out-of-pocket expenditures as a share of a benchmark: what total health care spending would be if a private insurer covered the beneficiary. By 2030, the beneficiary’s spending would be 68 percent of that benchmark under the proposal.
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/121xx/doc12128/04-05-ryan_letter.pdf
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
PolitiFact has chosen the Democrats’ claim that “Republicans voted to end Medicare” as 2011 Lie of the Year. The facts that led the Democrats to attack the Ryan Medicare plan that the House Republicans passed are not in dispute. PolitiFact’s lie accusation stemmed simply from the imprecision of the Democrats’ political rhetoric, and not from a dispute about the actual facts that Democrats were attempting to publicize through simple sound bites.
Under the Republican-approved proposal, the traditional Medicare program would be phased out totally and replaced with private insurance plans. Much of the financing responsibility would gradually shift to the Medicare beneficiaries. According to the Congressional Budget Office, by 2030 two-thirds of the costs would be paid by the beneficiary, and only one-third paid by the government. In almost no way does this resemble the Medicare program that we know.
Nevertheless this almost entirely new program would still carry the Medicare label. Thus PolitiFact can argue that, technically, Republicans did not vote to end Medicare. But substantively, the infrastructure of the traditional Medicare program would be ended with not much more than the label surviving.
Norman Ornstein makes the important point that the Democrats would have been factually correct had they made a few small tweaks to their attack lines (e.g., “end Medicare as we know it,” which was used effectively). That is a lesson that we all should learn.
Unfortunately, PolitiFact did knock its credibility down a notch on this one. Poorly crafted sounds bites are worthy of a demerit, but the shocking truth behind the crucial message that the Democrats were trying to convey certainly did not warrant the “Pants on Fire” 2011 Lie of the Year award. That award should have been bestowed instead upon the Republicans who claimed that they voted to save Medicare.