The Sound Bite:

Medicare is used as a tool to gain political advantage during elections. 

Fact or Fiction?

Fact. Both sides want to use Medicare as an issue for partisan advantage. 

After picking up a House seat the 2011 special election in New York, the Democrats decided to make Medicare a hot topic in this year’s campaign. It is now front and center in the 2012 presidential election.

Medicare spending is rising at a faster rate than the general growth in the economy, and in the rate of wages. The same problem applies to health care costs in general throughout the economy. Any solutions will be very difficult because there haven’t been any effective ways to control costs that consumers are willing to accept. There is scant appetite to pay more in taxes for Medicare or to cut Medicare benefits. 

Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee said, “There were three fundamental lessons that both Democrats and Republicans learned from the special election in New York, and they are Medicare, Medicare, and Medicare.”

Democrats are denouncing the GOP plan, developed by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) to convert Medicare for people under 55 to a premium support or voucher system, with people choosing among different insurance plans. But the value of the plans will be constrained to grow at a rate just 1% above inflation. This means that gradually, more and more of the cost of Medicare will be shifted away from taxpayers and onto the Medicare beneficiaries themselves.

The Republicans feel they have a potent weapon in discussing the cuts in Medicare spending included in the Affordable Care Act, which they denounce as “Obamacare.” The law calls for reductions in payments to Medicare Advantage plans, the health maintenance organizations used by 25% of Medicare beneficiaries.

Medicare helped the GOP make big gains in the 2010 elections, according to Robert Blendon, professor of health policy and political analysis at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Republicans “received the largest share of votes from people over the age of 60 in any election since the 1980s, according to Blendon. “In 2008, and particularly in 2010, [seniors] shifted to the Republican view,” he said.

Now, both parties are vying for the important senior vote. In the 2010 congressional elections, senior voters turned out in much larger numbers than younger Americans. Thirty-four percent of voters were age 60 or older, even though this age group accounts for only 24 percent of the adult population, Blendon wrote in a July article in the New England Journal of Medicine. 

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