The Dems are toast on Medicare

The Dems' complete misunderstanding of the state of the argument over Medicare is simply stunning. In today's NYT, Roger Cohen writes:

[T]he line of Democrat attack against [Romney] and Ryan is so clear: They are the heartless would-be destroyers of Medicare, the health insurance program for retirees (who abound in battleground state Florida), and Medicaid.

The problem with this line of attack is that the biggest threat to Medicare is posed not by Romney and Ryan, but by Obamacare, which requires that Medicare be cut by $700B to pay for some of the cost of adding tens of millions of new people to the insurance rolls. For example, John McDonough writes in the Boston Globe:

[I]t is undeniable that Congressional Democrats and the Obama White House chose to pay for nearly half the cost of the ACA by reducing Medicare's expected rate of growth by about $450 billion between 2010 and 2019. The number, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), is now up to around $700B because three early no-or-little reduction years have been supplanted by three full impact years (2013-2022).

(By the way, as I pointed out in an earlier blog post, the rest of the cost of adding those tens of millions of people to the insurance rolls will be paid for by tax increases.)

To be fair, the Democrats will argue that the $700B in cuts will result from cost savings brought about by the wonderfully enlightened provisions of Obamacare. For example, Ezra Klein writes in WaPo:

[I]n Title III, you’ll find dozens of different efforts to achieve these [cost-cutting] goals. The most famous of them is Section 3403, which establishes the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). ... . And then there are the subsequent reforms the administration has proposed to save more money. Those can be found on pages 33-37 of the president’s 2013 budget proposal.

In effect, the Democrats are telling seniors: Don't worry. Be happy. Yes, Obamacare does require us to cut $700B from Medicare, but wait until you see how much money IPAB and a couple of other enormous new bureaucracies are going to save us.

Here's where a little "senior" common sense will come in handy. Seniors will ask themselves: When was the last time the federal government created an enormous new bureaucracy and it saved $700B? And then they will say to themselves: And, if the savings don't materialize, real cuts will have to be made to Medicare (after all, those tens of millions of new insureds are definitely coming on board and will have to be paid for) and seniors will be screwed.

Yes, this is the "devastating" argument the Dems will be able to make to all those seniors who abound in battleground state Florida.