Lil White Lies: Return to Sender

It gets a little tiresome seeing “Grading” PolitiFact (PF) repeatedly engage in partial reporting on its reviews of PolitiFact. Or I should say, it accuses them of doing the same thing it does, the reason I’m starting this review with its very words.

In this ruling Obama campaign spokesperson Stephanie Cutter said that Paul Ryan’s Medicare Plan included the same cuts as the ones Obama is making. PolitiFact’s Angie Drobnic Holan writes that she is rating Cutter on "whether Cutter is correct that Ryan relies on those same reductions in his budget."

She finds her claim True because in an interview with George Stephanopoulos Ryan agrees: "Well, our budget keeps that money for Medicare to extend its solvency. What Obamacare does is it takes that money from Medicare to spend on Obamacare. ..." So Grading PolitiFact concludes:

Sorry, but that's not a fact check and it's very misleading. PolitiFact is seizing on an ambiguity from Ryan and insisting that it perfectly dovetails with Cutter's claim. A real fact check would verify from the text of Ryan's budget that the savings have the same origin as those projected by the CBO for the health care reform law. This fact check doesn't do that at all. Ryan's budget is neither listed among the sources on the sidebar nor linked in the text of the story.

First off, there’s a lot of other sources confirming Cutter’s remarks indirectly, such as the New York Times:  (emphasis mine)

Mitt Romney’s promise to restore $716 billion that he says President Obama “robbed” from Medicare has some health care experts puzzled, and not just because his running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan, included the same savings in his House budgets.

Or, FactCheck.Org: (emphasis mine)

The Romney campaign told us that the “Romney-Ryan plan” is Ryan’s latest Medicare plan, except it would not include any of those $716 billion cuts that were in the Affordable Care Act. Ryan’s plan did include the majority of those cuts, and overall, Ryan estimated his plan would lead to greater Medicare cuts/savings than the president’s.

Or ABC News, which stated its information on the Ryan-Obamacare cuts came from the Kaiser Family Foundation: (emphasis mine)

Voters might be left with the impression that Romney and Ryan have both opposed the cuts. The truth is that Ryan himself endorses them in his signature budget plan – the same plan Romney has said he would sign as president if it reached his desk.

Those Medicare savings -achieved through reduced provider reimbursements and curbed waste, fraud and abuse, not benefit cuts – appear in the House Republicans’ FY 2013 budget, which Ryan authored.

His plan would in part repeal the entirety of the Affordable Care Act — except the reductions in Medicare spending now at the center of debate, according to analysts with the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.

Or NBC News, linked in the ruling’s source list:  (emphasis mine)

The Affordable Care Act – Obamacare – does cut the growth of Medicare by $700 billion over 10 years. But benefits to seniors actually increase under Obamacare, which reduces payments to providers in exchange for more people covered by insurance. What’s more, the Ryan plan – approved by the House – cuts Medicare spending every bit as much as Obamacare does. In fact, it incorporates the very same budget projections, even as it repeals Obamacare. That’s what you call having it both ways.

Faced with questions about Ryan's support for these cuts, the Romney campaign clarified its position Monday evening and disagreed with those cuts.

White cites an article by Dave Weigel of Slate, which he says belies PolitiFact’s argument as to how the "cuts" are to be achieved:

Remember, Obamacare is supposed to save $700 billion by capping the rise in Medicare spending from GDP growth plus 0.5 percent. The Ryan budgets in 2012 and 2013 don’t alter Medicare for anyone entering it before 2022—a buffer that lets current retirees breathe easy. After 2022, it turns all of Medicare into a premium support plan like Medicare Advantage. At that point, “an annual competitive bidding process” is supposed to push providers to provide lower rates. “The per capita cost of this reformed program for seniors reaching eligibility after 2023,” explains Ryan in his budget guide, “could not exceed nominal GDP growth plus 0.5 percent.” So, if it works, it’s got the exact same Medicare cap as the Obama plan.

He also looks at the CBO score of Ryan’s proposed budget, which appears to compare an “extended baseline” with an “alternative fiscal” scenario of Medicare spending as a percent of GDP. He appears to assert that the “extended baseline” is with the “Obamacare Medicare cuts” and the “alternative fiscal” is without the cuts. In other words, the “alternative fiscal” (“without the cuts”) must be Ryan’s actual budget, thereby making Cutter’s claim incorrect.

So, is this another PolitiFact gotcha moment for Grading PolitiFact? Well, not quite. In his budget proposals, all those news sources appear to be correct: Ryan really did  repeal most of the provisions in ACA with the exception of the Medicare cuts...so, why did he include them? 

Despite Republicans’ repeated pledges to repeal the law, Ryan’s budget plan repealed the pieces of the health care law that expanded health insurance, but kept the Medicare cuts in place. One reason Ryan needs the Affordable Care Act’s Medicare cuts is because he delays his big changes to the Medicare program—which would give seniors a choice between traditional Medicare and a commercial plan—for 11 years, a move that makes the plan far more politically palatable. But the delay also means Ryan had to find another way to achieve hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicare savings…

Before the reform law passed, Medicare’s trust fund was set to expire in 2016. After the law passed, the life of the trust fund was extended to 2024, because the program would be paying providers less money. If Ryan reversed those cuts, he would be making the Medicare program worse off in terms of financial accounting, even though the cuts are ultimately not being used for Medicare.

That Ryan used the "cut" it in both his proposals is confirmed in this piece from the Miami Herald: (emphasis added)

But in 2011 and 2012, Ryan’s spending proposals left one ObamaCare vestige intact: The Medicare cuts.

The cuts were estimated at $500 billion over a decade, and only increased to $700 billion last month after a new analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Republicans in 2010 used those Medicare cuts as an effective political weapon. Seniors voted in droves against Democrats.

Then, the following year, House Republicans voted to keep those very cuts the party pilloried with great success. The cuts weren't explicitly spelled out in the proposal, which wasn't so much legislation as it was a resolution that outlined spending goals. But by not repealing the cuts, the Ryan plan kept them in.

Notice it says "2011 and 2012" as well as “spending proposals” not “spending proposal” in singular. The cuts permit the program to last until its estimated insolvency in 2024, as Medicare transitions into RyanCare, which is nothing more than Obamacare for Seniors. In either CBO scenario, the years 2022 going forward are projected for the voucher plan. In other words, that initial year of 2022 was not just a ruse so “seniors could rest easy” until then, it was based on Medicare’s projected insolvency including the vestige of Obamacare’s “cuts.”

The difference between the “extended baseline” and “alternative fiscal” may simply be a matter of GDP cap, higher GDP estimates, or congressional action. The most reasonable possibility is that one includes all aspects of Obamacare (which would actually be what’s imbedded in current law—note it mentions the IPAB, which Ryan would love to repeal) and the other just includes the Obamacare “cuts” until it converges with the vision of RyanCare in 2022.

Ryan may have included further cuts as well, according to FactCheck.Org: (emphasis added)

Ryan estimated that his “Path to Prosperity” would spend $6.4 trillion on Medicare over 10 years (table S-3), and Obama’s fiscal year 2013 budget estimated $7 trillion for Medicare over the same time period (table S-4). So, with most of the Affordable Care Act spending reductions, Ryan’s plan would have cut about $600 billion more from expected Medicare spending than Obama’s.

And just the fact that Romney says he “restores the cuts” indicates that Ryan’s plan(s) included them. Romney said he disagreed with Ryan’s plan in that context, as noted by NBC quote above. So now, the new “Romney-RyanCare” hastens the Medicare insolvency from 2024 back to 2016, in order to provide some political urgency for the Republican congress under President Romney to start that Medi-coupon program a little sooner under the guise of “saving Medicare after Obama drove it into insolvency.”

So, Grading PolitiFact is wrong when it says that the “ evidence strongly suggests that the Ryan budget plan only relies on savings through ObamaCare to the extent that the CBO assumes that existing law will remain in effect--its standard procedure--while projecting the effects of Ryan's budget.” Ryan’s budget included the cuts back early in 2011 and continued to include them until Romney took them out.  Writer White didn't have to do much Googling to find this out for himself.  It looks like he engaged in his own selection bias to find something to fit his PolitiFact-has-a-liberal-bias narrative.

He might make a case that PolitiFact appeared to rely too heavily on Ryan’s statement as something to complain about.  But there’s plenty of other evidence to show that Ryan includes the Obamacare “cuts” in all of his proposals, and it seems to me Holan looked at everything else and concluded the best evidence would be something straight from Ryan himself.  And it  doesn't change the ruling.

If he is going to claim the PolitiFact team “mailed it in” on this one, his review needs to be marked “return to sender.” Politi-Psy has just left the building.

Postscript September 1, 2012:  According to the Huffington Post,  Republican Virginia Representative and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor confirmed the $716 billion Medicare “cuts” in the Ryan Budget Plan. “While Cantor couldn't explain why Ryan included the reduction and subsequently attacked it, Ryan has said that he added the cuts because Obama included them first. ’He put those cuts there," he said while eating a hot dog at a recent campaign stop after he was announced as the nominee. ‘ “