by Patrick Appel
Goddard says "Republicans are quietly circulating a fascinating case study on how they think candidates can overcome any Ryan drag." It is bit long, but it does an excellent job explaining the GOP strategy:
Sonny Bunch urges the Romney campaign to borrow a tactic from the video above:
[Romney] has picked a candidate who has a mother on Medicare living in Florida. If team Romney isn’t cutting an ad right now starring Paul Ryan’s mom assuring the olds that her boy’s plan isn’t going to do anything to the Medicare of anyone over 55 and that this plan will ensure their grandkids have a shot at some form of Medicare when they get old and that President Obama is a dick who is lying about her boy and oh, by the way, Barack Obama wants to cut $700B from Medicare, we should sue the campaign for negligence and incompetence.
Kate Pickert wonders whether this strategy will succeed:
Expect Romney-Ryan and Obama-Biden to compete to see who can demagogue health care the best. The effectiveness of either campaign’s message remains to be seen. Voters have traditionally trusted Democrats more than Republicans when it comes to Medicare and Social Security. But the health care reform war of 2009, which focused a lot of attention on the ACA’s Medicare cuts, left a stain on Obama that might be hard to remove.
Ezra argues that the real Medicare debate isn't about the cuts themselves:
Ryan’s budget — which Romney has endorsed — keeps Obama’s cuts to Medicare, and both Ryan and Obama envision the same long-term spending path for Medicare. The difference between the two campaigns is not in how much they cut Medicare, but in how they cut Medicare.
Avik Roy agrees. Jonathan Cohn thinks the "most significant difference between the two sides, at least for the short- to medium-term, is how they handle the savings these cuts generate.":
Obamacare puts the money back into the pockets of people who need help with their medical bills. A portion of the money is earmarked for children and non-elderly Americans, who, starting in 2014, will become eligible for Medicaid or receive tax credits to offset the cost of private insurance. A smaller, but still significant, portion of the money is for seniors. It helps them pay for prescription drugs, by filling the "donut hole" in Medicare Par D coverage. It also eliminates out-of-pocket costs for annual wellness visits, some cancer screenings, and other preventative services. Those benefits have actually started already: In the first six months of this year, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, more than 16 million seniors took advantage of the free preventative care provision.
Ryan's budget—which, again, Romney has repeatedly embraced and said he would sign—actually takes those new benefits away. The Part D donut hole would open back up. Access to free preventative care would vanish. And where would Ryan and Romney put the money instead? They say it's for deficit reduction. I'd say it's really for their big new tax cuts, which disproportionately benefit the wealthy. If somebody is "stealing" from seniors here, it's not Obama.
The Dish 