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The Left is on Defense on Medicare

POSTED BY Galen Institute on August 31, 2012.

The Left is on defense over Medicare and the deep cuts and rationing ObamaCare will bring.  New York Times columnist Paul Krugman fires away with a blast of inaccuracies targeted at VP nominee Paul Ryan. Yuval Levin takes the points one by one and demolishes Krugman’s charges:

First we can treat in passing some points Krugman himself just makes in passing. He starts by restating some of the now disproven charges against Ryan on the Janesville GM plant, by insisting that Obamacare’s cuts in Medicare provider payments would not reduce access to care, by suggesting that pushing 4 million seniors out of Medicare Advantage would not mean reducing their benefits, and by implying that House Republicans would have reduced Medicare spending through price controls and Medicare Advantage cuts just as Obama would. Jim Capretta did a good job with all those here yesterday, and others have too.

Krugman then blithely asserts that Ryan’s budget proposed tax cuts that would have to be offset with spending cuts, but the budget very plainly calls on the Ways and Means Committee to produce a revenue neutral reform. It’s certainly true that the particulars were not specified, as particulars generally aren’t in a budget resolution, but the requirement for revenue neutrality was specified, and the Ryan budget used the CBO’s current-policy baseline as its revenue line, so Krugman’s claim here just doesn’t make sense.

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