Thursday, May 26, 2011

More Liberal Hypocrisy on Entitlement Reform

Speaking to Politico’s Pulse blog, Families USA’s Ron Pollack talked about the impact of the House Republican budget and Medicare:

So much of the attack on the ACA really focused on the $500 billion…Republicans kept on hammering on this, I think very effectively. Unlike the Affordable Care Act, which plowed [the $500 billion] into improvements in the health care system, the House budget is taking that money [out].

Remember that Obamacare engaged in double-counting; as the Medicare actuary has previously noted, Medicare spending reductions in the law “cannot be simultaneously used to finance other federal outlays and to extend the [Medicare] trust fund, despite the appearance of this result from the respective accounting conventions.”  So what Ron Pollack is really saying is that diverting more than $500 billion from seniors’ Medicare to create a new and unsustainable entitlement constitutes “improvements in the health care system,” while ensuring that Medicare savings are actually used to improve Medicare’s solvency – which the House-passed budget does – is “taking that money [out].”

This kind of logic raises two questions:  Whom does the left think that Medicare funds should protect:  Are those savings funds that should keep promises to seniors, or a “slush fund” for liberal groups to use to finance whatever new unsustainable entitlements they care to propose?  And why should seniors believe the arguments of an organization which apparently believes that keeping Medicare funds for Medicare beneficiaries represents bad policy?