Republicans Want to End Medicare

December 23, 2011, 8:57 am
More PolitiFact
by Paul Krugman

I was going to write something snarky about the attempt at self-justification, but on second thought I’ll just lay it out straight.

The background here is that Republicans voted to dismantle Medicare as we know it — a single-payer system in which the government pays essential medical bills — and replace it with a voucher scheme that, in the judgment of many health-care experts (and the Congressional Budget Office), would leave seniors having to pay large premiums out of pocket in order to afford adequate insurance; clearly, some and perhaps many would end up without adequate coverage.

This really is the end of the program we now know as Medicare. Maybe PolitiFact would like Democrats to use longer words and include qualifications, rather than saying simply that it ends Medicare — although as Brad DeLong points out, some of the Ryan plan’s supporters actually boasted that, yes, it ends Medicare as we know it. But it’s just absurd to call Democrats’ basically factual statement “Lie of the Year”.

Making that call was just a terrible decision, and it reeks of a philosophy that ranks achieving “balance” as being more important than reporting the facts.