I have been amazed all week at the glowing reports from almost everyone in the left-wing media about the McClatchy-Marist poll showing that 70% of Americans don’t want Medicare and Medicaid touched. Every time they have had a chance to question a conservative or member of the GOP they’ve grilled them incessantly over the poll results.
The question in response that needs to be asked by the interviewees is “who is the only President to sign into law a cut in Medicare?”. With the $500B cut from Medicare to fund Obamacare, I think it will be safe to assume that the interviewer will not want to deal with that reality and it brings up the subject of Obamacare. The issue of Obamacare didn’t turn out very well for them in’10.
Not once hearing the simple fact of the ”who’s cut Medicare” line spoken, Reince Preibus and the GOP need to start sharping their message heading into the 2012 election cycle.
Moe Lane
PG DeFreese
Victoria Coates
Daniel Horowitz
Dan Spencer
This issue terrifies me
exitsfunnel Friday, April 22nd at 3:00PM EST (link)Let me preface this by stating that I am 100%, unambiguously in favor of abolishing medicare. In fact, I think that the fiscal reality is that medicare as we know it is going away one way or the other over the next two decades (and possibly sooner) so we may as well try to scale it down in an orderly fashion.
That said, ignoring the ultimate consequences of doing nothing and just looking at the cold, hard, cynical politics of 2012, this issue and the GOP votes for the Ryan budget terrify me. The cuts to Medicare in Obamacare (which they are already working to walk back) are nothing like what Ryan is proposing. Ryan is talking about dismantling the whole system and replacing it with something new and frankly, if looked at only from the perspective of the person receiving the benefits, something worse.
The GOPs only chance on this issue is to convince the greater public that there is no option, that the current system (or anything like it) is simply unsustainable. If they can’t do this, forget about winning either the White House or the Senate and say hello again to Speaker Pelosi.