Against It Before I Was For It

Senator John McCain is just fighting like crazy on behalf of seniors by introducing an amendment trying to stop Obamacare's $487 billion in Medicare "unspecified" reductions. This, of course, is a wonderful turnaround from a short 12 months ago when Presidential Candidate John McCain announced that his own presidential healthcare plan would be paid for with $1.3 trillion in "unspecified" cuts to Medicare.

McCain has plenty of company in his hypocrisy. As Volsky goes on to note, many of the Republicans likely to vote in favor of McCain's amendment voted for the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, whichalso called for substantial Medicare cuts. Sam Brownback, Charles Grassley, Jon Kyl... the list goes on.

Of course, there were some critical differences between the Medicare reductions Republicans backed during the 1990s and the ones Democrats propose today. But those differences don't exactly put the Republican attacks in a more favorable light.

During the 1990s, Republicans eyed Medicare savings as a way to free up money for tax cuts, the majority of which would benefit the wealthy. Today, Democrats want to use Medicare savings as a way to finance health care reform, which will — on balance — do a lot more to help the poor and middle-class. You can argue whether such a shift is fair — more on that later — but it's hard to argue that such a shift is less fair than what the Republicans had in mind.

In the '90s, the Republicans weren't overly specific about the kinds of cuts they had in mind. They simply wanted to slash Medicare's funding, in many cases because they supported Newt Gingrich's crusade to let Medicare "wither on the vine." The Democratic approach is to find savings that target the program's inefficiencies, whether it's unjustified subsidies to private insurance companies or payments to hospitals that have chronically high rates of inpatient infections. If those reductions work as planned — and I think there's good reason to think they will, although I concede that's a fair debate — one result will be better care for seniors.

In fact, Republicans have voted to cut Medicare quite unanimously 15 times in the last 15 years. Now on the 16th chance they actually have the opportunity to do so... and nope.

In related news, AARP supports the proposed cuts to Medicare. "Most importantly, the legislation does not reduce any guaranteed Medicare benefits," A. Barry Rand, the AARP's CEO, said in a letter to senators.