Romney: I’ll End Medicare Faster Than Newt Gingrich
As Newt Gingrich continues to surge in the polls in both early states and nationally, Mitt Romney’s increasingly panicked campaign appears to have settled on an interesting strategy: run to the right of Gingrich based on a full embrace of Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) politically toxic and economically disastrous budget plan.
(Newt Gingrich initially — and correctly — characterized the Ryan plan to end Medicare as “radical” “right-wing social engineering” before later apologizing, which essentially destroyed his campaign earlier this year.)
Here’s Romney at a town hall meeting today repeating his full embrace of the Ryan plan to end Medicare:
Mitt Romney:
“I applauded it…We’re going to have make changes like the ones Paul Ryan proposed…and I applaud what Paul Ryan did.”
In Brief: What the Ryan Plan to End Medicare Fully Endorsed by Romney Would Do
- End Medicare as we know it
- Turn Medicare into a voucher system
- Shift health care costs away from the government onto the backs of seniors
- Double seniors’ out of pocket health care costs
Click this chart for a full Center for American Progress analysis of the Ryan plan:
Earlier this week, Romney added one innovation to the Ryan plan that would make it significantly worse. He proposed ending the guaranteed, mandatory nature of Medicare and would instead make Congress vote each year on the value of the vouchers he wants to give seniors — subjecting seniors’ basic health care needs to the whims of an increasingly dysfunctional body. This would be nothing short of a disaster for seniors.
Irrational Behavior?
Yesterday, top Mitt Romney surrogate John Sununu, the former governor of New Hampshire, said criticizing the plan to end Medicare was “irrational behavior.” Apparently Mitt Romney’s campaign thinks the thousands of Americans who attended town hall meetings this spring to express their objections to ending Medicare were engaging in “irrational behavior.”
Here’s a video recap of the anger over the plan to end Medicare at this spring’s town halls:
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