From John McCain, explaining his undying opposition to proposed reductions in the growth of Medicare spending:
All of these are cuts in the obligations that we have assumed and are the rightful benefits that people have earned… I will eagerly look forward to hearing from the authors of this legislation as to how
they can possibly achieve half a trillion dollars in cuts without impacting existing Medicare programs negatively and eventually lead to rationing of health care in this country.
On the big list of political sins, I generally think hypocrisy is overrated. It’s great gotcha material for Sunday morning talk shows, but in the end it’s usually pretty trivial stuff.
But the Republican switcheroo on Medicare is really in a league of its own. Here’s a party that opposed Medicare viciously in the first place, routinely spoke out against it in the years that followed, was dedicated to gutting it in the 1990s, voted for major cuts in 1997, and has been using it as a cudgel ever since to get its base riled up over the future bankruptcy of America. McCain himself proposed over a trillion dollars in Medicare cuts just 12 months ago. But now? Well, now it’s 2003 all over again and there are elections to think of. So now they’re righteously opposed to cutting so much of a nickel out of Medicare spending, even if the cuts are aimed at waste, fraud, inefficient programs, and bad incentives. It’s just jaw droppingly mendacious. More at the link.
