Republicans getting tripped up on Medicare switches...
clipped from www.huffingtonpost.com
A new effort by Senate Democrats to expand Medicare coverage by opening it up to 55- to 64-year-olds has forced Republicans into an about face of sorts.
Republican Senators, who for weeks have been dogging their Democratic counterparts for pursuing what they describe as drastic cuts to the Medicare program, are now making the awkward shift from ostensibly championing Medicare to fighting against its expansion.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-K.Y.) sent out a press release on Sunday, titled: “Cutting Medicare is not what Americans want.” That was followed by a new press release on Monday. Its title: “Expanding Medicare ‘a plan for financial ruin.’
“We already know that Medicare is going broke in seven years,” McConnell told Fox News on Tuesday.
“This is the worst kind of political deal-making in this frantic attempt to get to 60 votes.”
But, politically speaking, the GOP position on the government-run health care program certainly has become twisted, and then twisted again.
In August, Republicans came to the conclusion that they could win political traction by framing their party as a defender of the government-run system, despite having decried it for decades. RNC Chairman Michael Steele released a “seniors’ health care bill of rights” and held a testy exchange with an NPR reporter to drive this home his Medicare support.
It seemed like opportunism then. Now, however, it has the potential to trip the GOP up. Having spent the last two weeks insisting that Democrats were destroying the bedrock of health care coverage for seniors, Republicans may soon be forced to explain why expanding Medicare coverage would be a bad thing.
Let’s see how they approach this in the Senate today (I’m especially interested in how McCain, who has been ranting and screaming this week that the Democrats were destroying Medicare by making cuts… what will he do now?)
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