Progressive Opinion

nytimes.com — It is the morning of Wednesday, Nov. 7, and after a long night of celebrating and a short night of sleep, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan wake up to confront the question awaiting every new administration: Of the campaign’s many promises, which few will become the real priorities? If they win the White House, Republicans are also more likely than not to hold on to the House of Representatives and win a narrow majority in the Senate. The party could then embark on the kind of aggressive legislative push that President Obama and the Democrats did in 2009. Only four years after Democrats seemed on the verge of historic policy gains, Republicans could reverse many of those gains and then some. They could cut the top tax rate to its lowest level in 80 years (as Mr. Romney proposes) and make major changes to federal programs.

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washingtonpost.com — The 2008 Republican party platform on Medicare and Medicaid was pretty vanilla. It called for minor tweaks to the program that just about any health wonk could get behind, things like better coordination between doctors and more vigilance against fraud. The whole section came in at about 200 words. Politico has obtained a draft of the 2012 proposal and, for health care, four years has meant a sea change. The Republican party now throws its weight behind a complete restructuring of both entitlement programs. Since Medicare and Medicaid were created in 1965, they have operated as insurance plans where subscribers receive a set amount of benefits. The Republican plan calls for a fundamental change to that structure. They want to set a specific budget for the program and then have seniors and states figure out what benefits they can purchase. The concept of “defined benefit” gets thrown out the window.

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washingtonpost.com — As a general rule in politics, if you’ve got two guys from the Republican Party running for president on a platform that says you can’t cut even a dollar from Medicare for current retirees. But here’s the thing. Paul Ryan says his budget cuts more than $5 trillion in the next decade. Less than a trillion of that is coming from Medicare. Mitt Romney says his budget cuts about $7 trillion from the budget over the next decade and not a dollar of that comes from Medicare. If you’re not cutting Medicare or Social Security or defense you’ve already taken more than half of the federal budget off the table. And you know what’s mainly left, the big pot of money you can still cut? Programs for poor people.

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slate.com — One key argument Mitt Romney has been advancing about Medicare is that the Obama administration "raided" the program in order to pay for the Affordable Care Act. Since political journalism tends to exist in a plane of pure rhetoric, a lot of the Democratic pushback on this has focused on the fact that Paul Ryan and other congressional Republicans are banking on these very same cuts in order to make their own budget math add up. But Jackie Calmes' piece in today's NYT makes the more important point that Obama's alleged raid increases the life of the Medicare trust fund, and if Romney reverses the "cuts" the program actually goes bust sooner. That's because what Obama cut wasn't the flow of revenue into the Medicare piggy bank, it was the reimbursement rate Medicare pays out of the piggy bank.

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thedailybeast.com — My brother-in-law Vincent sits with me as I finish this piece. He is intellectually disabled and has been repeatedly hospitalized, most recently last week. As someone who relies on Medicare, he will be deeply affected by the outcome of this election. Yet Vincent, like millions of others, doesn’t only rely on Medicare; he relies on Medicaid, too. While Democrats have been hammering Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan on Medicare over the past week, lambasting their proposal to convert the program to vouchers, far less attention has been paid to the Republican duo’s plans for Medicaid—even though, for many people, the fates of the two programs are closely linked. Medicaid has always been Medicare’s essential backstop. About one third of Medicare spending finances services for “dual-eligibles”—nine million people who, like Vincent, are eligible for both programs, and who often have complex needs. So what do Romney and Ryan have in store for dual-eligibles?

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salon.com — Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan were quick to flee Rep. Todd Akin’s drowning ship after he said that victims of “legitimate rape” magically don’t get pregnant, but a closer inspection reveals that Ryan’s views on abortion are not that different from Akin’s. “Governor Romney and Congressman Ryan disagree with Mr. Akin’s statement, and a Romney-Ryan administration would not oppose abortion in instances of rape,” a Romney spokesperson said in a statement late last night. Romney, of course, has a bipolar relationship with the issue of a woman’s right to choose, but the spokesperson’s statement represents a flip-flop for Ryan, who has proposed and supported legislation that would outlaw abortion with no exception for rape.

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dailykos.com — Republican demagoguery of Medicare began well before President Johnson signed it into law in 1965. "I was there, fighting the fight, voting against Medicare," Bob Dole later boasted, "Because we knew it wouldn't work in 1965." In 1964, George H.W. Bush was among the first to call it "socialized medicine." And three years earlier, Ronald Reagan voiced his opposition. But they were wrong. Medicare did work and Americans in their sunset years were more free, not less. Before Medicare, half of seniors had no health insurance at all, a crisis which has been virtually eliminated. And the poverty rate for Americans 65 and older was cut in half in under 10 years. Of course, for Republicans yesterday defeats are tomorrow's battles. Their long war on Medicare was no different.

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thedailybeast.com — Paul Ryan’s elevation to the national stage has triggered heightened interest in the critical debate on the future of Medicare. We should welcome and engage it. The outcome will affect the health and quality of life of every American, either immediately or at some point in the future. Thus far, candidates Romney and Ryan have focused exclusively on the size and sustainability of the Medicare budget. But that misses the most important factor in this debate: one can’t address rising Medicare costs without also addressing our nation’s health-care costs in total. Neither Medicare nor any other health-related program in the country can survive unless we contain health costs sectorwide. But to do that successfully policymakers must take three fundamental realities into account.

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truthdig.com — Deficit hawks are worried that the Medicare debate in the presidential campaign will make it impossible to reach a post-election deal to balance the budget. At the same time, much of the punditry focuses on how mean and nasty this campaign is. Those who are anxious about the deficit should relax. This campaign could actually pave the way for a sensible budget deal. And those who bemoan the rock-’em-sock-’em campaign should stop wringing their hands and get about the business of calling out falsehoods and identifying misleading assertions.

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robertreich.org — I keep hearing that Mitt Romney’s pick of Paul Ryan “enables the country to have the debate it needs to have,” or “permits us to have a grownup discussion,” or “finally presents America with a real choice.” The New York Times oped page proclaims: “Let the Real Debate Begin!” Debate? What debate? Romney’s choice of Ryan won’t usher in a “real debate” about much of anything except, perhaps, the danger to our democracy of billionaires like casino-magnate Sheldon Adelson (whose blessing Ryan immediately sought this week) who are pouring tens of millions of dollars into negative advertising. (Adelson alone has committed $100 million of his fortune.) Those negative ads, by the way, are making it all the harder for average Americans to sort out the truth from well-financed big lies – and understand, let alone debate, the big issues this election year.

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