The Deficit Commission and the Left’s Double Standards
The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities released a report this afternoon analyzing last week’s draft recommendations from the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission. The health care sections of the paper in particular are worth examining, for the way in which they treat some of the co-chairs’ recommendations to reduce Medicare spending as part of a comprehensive deficit reduction package. One paragraph in the CBPP’s analysis includes the following passage:
The plan proposes to accelerate cuts in payments to hospitals that provide charity care to the uninsured without accelerating the health reform coverage expansions that make those budget cuts viable in the first place. And it proposes a new round of cuts in payments to Medicare providers on top of the substantial cuts that the health reform law already makes, which in turn could lead many physicians and other providers to decline to accept Medicare patients.
The paper goes on to recommend that policy-makers should “scale back excessive health care cuts, especially those that could harm vulnerable people.”
Compared to the comments above, it’s interesting to look at the CBPP’s August analysis of the Medicare trustees report, and their claims that the health care law extends Medicare’s solvency. The August report says the health care law will “slow the growth” of Medicare spending no fewer than seven separate times, yet nowhere does the paper term the law’s provisions “cuts” to Medicare. Likewise, the brief does not suggest that the law will impose any new access burdens on seniors and emphasizes that the health care law’s “improvement in Medicare’s financing occurs without any reduction in the program’s guaranteed benefits.”
This obvious change in rhetoric between a prominent liberal organization’s stance on the health care law and the deficit commission draft proposal raises some interesting questions:
- Why are Medicare savings provisions called “cuts” when they reduce the deficit, but “slow[ing] the growth” of health care spending when they are instead re-directed toward creating new entitlements, as they were in the health care legislation?
- If liberal organizations are concerned about “vulnerable” seniors regarding last week’s deficit proposals, why did they remain silent when the Medicare actuary concluded that beneficiary access would suffer thanks to the health care law in his statement of actuarial opinion on the trustees report?
- If the health care law achieved Medicare savings “without any reduction in the program’s guaranteed benefits,” as the CBPP claimed in August, why wouldn’t the proposed “new round of cuts in payments to Medicare providers” not have the same effect – reducing the deficit while ensuring seniors’ “guaranteed benefits” remain intact?
My point here is not to endorse or condemn the draft commission report, either generally or in its specific suggestions. But I do think it’s worth noting how clearly the left strongly supports Medicare savings if they are used as a “slush fund” to expand government, while just as strongly opposing Medicare savings proposals if they are used to reduce the deficit and thus limit government spending.