Medicare reform: Political suicide for the GOP?

last updated 8 January 2015

“The Democrats are levitating with joy,” said Gail Collins in The New York Times. They’ve finally found an issue guaranteed to win back millions of voters, while tying Republicans up in knots from now until the 2012 election. It’s Republican Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan to privatize Medicare, or, as Democrats put it, “end Medicare as we know it,” by replacing the current program with vouchers that senior citizens could use to buy health coverage. By running against the Ryan Medicare plan, Democrat Kathy Hochul scored a huge upset victory in a heavily conservative New York congressional district last week, and “never have you seen so many smiling liberals.” For the next 17 months, every Democrat will be talking about “how the Republicans want to kill off Medicare.” For GOP candidates, said Robert Creamer in HuffingtonPost.com, the Ryan plan is sure to be a “political kiss of death.”

Republicans now have two choices, said Jonah Goldberg in NationalReview.com. With nearly unanimous endorsement of Ryan’s plan by House and Senate Republicans, they can stand their ground and fight—or run like cowards. To fight back, Republicans must attack Obama’s “status quo plus” plan, which lets Medicare costs spiral out of control until unelected bureaucrats impose draconian cuts. That argument has merit, said Michael Gerson in The Washington Post, but it’s hard to win elections by promising austerity. Instead, Republicans should do a bit of Clintonian “triangulation,” and suggest alternatives that are less painful and drastic than Ryan’s approach. “This is not heresy, it’s strategy.”

Democrats, too, need a strategy for Medicare, other than beating up on Republicans, said Matt Miller in The Washington Post. Everyone agrees that Medicare is headed for insolvency, and Ryan is right that the U.S. has to reduce its per capita health-care spending, which is the highest in the world. Simply exploiting voters’ fears is both irresponsible and dishonest, said The New York Times in an editorial. Democrats shouldn’t forget that President Obama’s health-care-reform plan shrinks Medicare spending by $500 billion through 2019. If Democrats are “to have any credibility on the deficit and the economy,” they should openly talk about how they’d cut Medicare spending differently than Ryan would, as opposed to promoting the illusion that no cuts are necessary. “Voters might appreciate a dose of honesty and realism.”