Last Friday, the Obama re-election campaign allowed America’s
crazy uncle to get in front of a group of Florida seniors and
frighten the bejabbers out of them with horror stories about the
evil designs Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have on Medicare and Social
Security. As his entourage cringed in the background, Biden brayed
as only he can bray. In addition to repeating long-ago-debunked
claims about the Romney-Ryan Medicare plan and a new stretcher
about a fictitious GOP plot to tax Social Security, the Vice
President attempted to reassure his audience that ObamaCare can
siphon $716 billion from Medicare while simultaneously improving
their benefits. He accomplished his last feat by unilaterally
adding a new benefit to Medicare — the free colonoscopy.
Biden
told the crowd: “President Obama has increased the benefits
available to people on Medicare…if you conclude you need a
colonoscopy…you don’t have to pay a co-pay for that.” Many
conservatives have pounced on this claim as if it were merely
evidence that Obamacare is a vote-buying scheme. But the real
problem is that it is a lie. While “reform” did add some wellness
benefits to Medicare, the insinuation that colonoscopies are now
free is absurd. If, for example, a screening colonoscopy actually
finds a problem, the patient will almost always have some
out-of-pocket expense. As Medicare
puts it, “If a screening test results in the biopsy or removal
of a lesion or growth, the procedure is considered diagnostic and
you may have to pay coinsurance or a copayment.”
Having delivered himself of the “free colonoscopy” whopper,
Biden moved on to the latest fictional work of horror created by
the script writers of the Obama reelection campaign: “If Gov.
Romney’s plan goes into effect, it could mean that everyone, every
one of you, would be paying more on taxes on your Social
Security…The average senior would have to pay $460 a year more in
taxes for their Social Security. Ladies and gentlemen, that’s…while
these guys are…hemorrhaging tax cuts for the super wealthy.” This
baloney is based on a “study” by the Tax Policy Center, a joint
venture of the left-leaning Urban Institute and the Brookings
Institution, and it amounts to nothing more than speculation based
on a variety of assumptions not found in any Romney proposal.
As Arlette Saenz
reports, “Romney’s plan does not specify that he would achieve
such goals by raising taxes on Social Security. When Romney
unveiled his plan in 2011, he promised there would be no tax hikes
on Social Security benefits.” Nonetheless, there was good old Joe,
telling the seniors of Boca Raton that Romney was planning to raise
taxes on them. The irony here is that Biden himself actually
has voted to raise taxes on Social Security, when he voted
for President Clinton’s 1993 budget, Saenz writes. Oddly, the vice
president neglected to mention that vote. The Romney campaign
reminded him: “These attacks will backfire when voters learn he has
repeatedly supported higher Social Security taxes.”
Biden has, however, never been one to let mere facts prevent him
from demagoguing an issue. He went on with stretcher after
stretcher. Like the rest of the president’s accomplices, he
continues to repeat the thoroughly debunked claim that Romney and
Ryan want to replace Medicare with a voucher system. As I
pointed out last week, the researchers at Factcheck.org have
failed to find a scrap of evidence that the Republican plan
involves vouchers. Nonetheless, Biden assured his audience that he
and Obama could be trusted not to “voucherize” Medicare: “Folks, I
ask you the rhetorical question: Can you imagine me as vice
president, can you imagine the president supporting a plan that
would, under any circumstances, would raise the cost for seniors
$6,400, your out-of-pocket?”
This bit about the $6,400 increase in out-of-pocket expenses for
Medicare patients is another feature of the fictional Romney-Ryan
“voucher” program, and it is, as Biden and his fellow demagogues
know perfectly well, another lie. As it happens, the people at
Factcheck.org have also been forced to shoot down this claim after
it was repeated over and over again at the Democratic National
Convention. They
wrote:
We once again heard misrepresentations of the Medicare plan that
Romney and Paul Ryan have proposed. Health and Human Services
Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and labor leader Mary Kay Henry both
said the plan would cost seniors $6,400, but that’s a reference to
an outdated Ryan plan, not the more generous one he, and Romney,
now back.
The truly Orwellian feature of Biden’s “Mediscare” speech in
Boca Raton, and speeches by other Obama administration officials,
is that it is their own policies that should frighten seniors.
Obamacare created the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), a
fifteen member panel of unelected bureaucrats whose primary mission
is to ration health care to Medicare patients, and over time,
Obama, Biden and their cronies are becoming less and less reticent
about their plans to save money by denying care to the elderly.
Just a couple of weeks ago, a former Obama administration official
wrote a New York Times
column whose first four words were, “We need death panels.” It
goes on to advocate “allocating health care resources more
prudently — rationing, by its proper name…”
That costs can be controlled without pulling the plug on Granny
has never occurred to these people, despite the success in the
Medicare Part D program, whose free market innovations actually
worked. Unfortunately, in the minds of Biden and his boss,
“cost control” means government-imposed rationing of care. If they
succeed in scaring seniors into voting against Romney and Ryan with
lies like those told by crazy old Joe last Friday, seniors will rue
the day they fell for the scam — if they live.
