Biden won’t save Medicare by stabbing Republicans
Quin Hillyer
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President Joe Biden could have done a truly constructive thing by writing in Tuesday’s New York Times about the need to save the Medicare system from insolvency. Instead, he spread lies and took political cheap shots, thus offering poison rather than good policy medicine.
Medicare’s finances are indeed precarious. That’s why some of us for two decades have been begging for bipartisan, cooperative, no-blame efforts to extend the system’s life span. And it’s why we all may need to swallow at least a few mildly unwanted policy changes to get everybody on the same page to save Medicare.
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On Tuesday, Biden could have extended an olive branch to Republicans and invited them to join such a reformist effort. Instead, he absolutely bashed Republicans while flagrantly misdescribing how the system works and outrageously promising “savings” as if with a magic wand. This nasty, partisan approach is why almost nothing ever gets done to save Medicare, even as its date of financial doom moves ever nearer.
Here’s how the president first described, and lied about, Republican approaches to Medicare: “For decades, I’ve listened to my Republican friends claim that the only way to be serious about preserving Medicare is to cut benefits. … Some have threatened our economy unless I agree to benefit cuts. Only in Washington can people claim that they are saving something by destroying it.”
First, to say that most major Republican plans propose “benefit cuts” is a flat-out lie. Second, nobody of good faith invites someone to a table by describing them as evildoers intent on destroying the feast. What Biden offered here isn’t public-spirited leadership — it’s an escalation of a political knife fight.
When Biden actually began talking about policy, he didn’t get any better. Granted, he put on the table something most conservatives don’t like, but which, in honest negotiations that involve him swallowing conservative ideas in return, might be accepted in form if ratcheted down in size. Namely, he wrote, “My budget proposes to increase the Medicare tax rate on earned and unearned income above $400,000 to 5 % from 3.8%.”
Alas, this large but at least debatable tax hike proposal was only part of a broader, statistically dishonest attack on “the wealthy,” as if somehow government can take enough money just from the top 5% of income earners to cover every leftist fantasy. The next time Biden shows he understands arithmetic will be the first time.
From a policy perspective, the rest of Biden’s column was pure flim-flam. Some of it perhaps he sincerely believes, but he must know that other parts are mere political talking points that fudge the truth. Among the former is his repetition of the leftist obsession with having government “negotiate” the price of Medicare prescription drugs. I’ve explained in about a dozen prior columns why that will do more harm than good both in pricing and by harming medical research.
But even apart from the diverging analyses, Biden is being intellectually dishonest here. He claimed that the limited “negotiations” in last year’s massive spending bonanza will “reduce the deficit by $159 billion.” But even when Biden’s analysts originally claimed savings twice that large from price “negotiations,” the Congressional Budget Office wrote: “That decrease [projected, but not yet realized] was almost entirely offset by increases in projected outlays for other programs.” In other words, even the expected savings from Medicare negotiations (which will probably prove illusory anyway) are not going to make Medicare more solvent, nor even to cut the overall budget deficit. Biden is spending the savings on other programs.
But now, Biden wants us to believe that even more government price negotiations — he wants to adopt these even before the limited test project for negotiations has had a chance to prove itself — will save yet another $200 billion. And this time, unlike last time, he promises to “take those savings and put them directly into the Medicare trust fund.”
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Biden is promising changes that amount to hocus pocus to achieve savings for both government and seniors that history shows will probably never materialize, at the possible expense of retarding the development of new life-saving drugs. He does this while promising to use the imagined “savings” to keep Medicare solvent, even though he isn’t actually using previously projected “savings” for Medicare’s benefit at all.
This isn’t even a good-natured magic show. It’s perfidious prestidigitation with a nasty partisan edge.