If anyone doubted President Joe Biden’s commitment to running for re-election next year, they need only examine his administration’s “plan” for extending Medicare’s solvency, published in advance of Thursday’s budget release. Rather than taking a serious approach to solving Medicare’s funding difficulties, the plan instead engages in political gamesmanship over the health care of millions of seniors. But an administration that wants to play games over Medicare should be careful what it wishes for because Republicans have ammunition to respond in kind.
The plan fails serious policy tests on several fronts. First, by relying largely on revenue to close shortfalls in Medicare’s Hospital Insurance Trust Fund, it ignores the program’s structural imbalances. None other than President Barack Obama said in 2011 that “if you look at the numbers, then Medicare in particular will run out of money and we will not be able to sustain that program no matter how much taxes go up.” Four years after those comments, Obama signed legislation that restructured elements of the Medicare benefit to lower program costs. If Obama remained active in politics today, Biden would likely attack him for “cutting” seniors’ benefits.
Second, the plan suggests diverting $200 billion from an expansion of drug price controls to improve the solvency of the Medicare Trust Fund. But this proposal comes mere months after Democrats diverted an even larger amount from the Part D prescription drug benefit to fund climate pork projects as part of last summer’s partisan spending blowout. It seems highly disingenuous for
