Fact check: Ad says Dems plan to cut Medicare

Polls indicate a neck-and-neck race in Ohio’s special election on Tuesday pitting Danny O’Connor, a Democrat, against Republican Troy Balderson to fill the state’s vacant seat in the 12th Congressional District.

O’Connor has made headway by charging that Balderson’s support of President Donald Trump’s debtfinanced tax cut will lead to reductions in Social Security and Medicare spending, such as by raising the retirement age. In one ad, O’Connor says he stands “against any cuts to Social Security and Medicare” — potentially an unrealistic pledge, given the burdens placed on old-age programs by the retirement of the baby-boom generation.

So now the Republicans have countered with their own claim of “Medicare cuts.” The ad, from a group tied to House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., begins by linking O’Connor to House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, Calif., and then makes a claim that initially confused: “O’Connor supports a Pelosibacked plan that cuts Medicare spending by $800 billion.”

What plan could that be? Republicans, in the 2012 presidential election campaign, charged that the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a Obamacare, would cut Medicare by $700 billion. The Post said then:

“This $700 billion figure comes from the difference over 10 years (2013-2022) between anticipated Medicare spending (what is known as ‘the baseline’) and the changes that the law makes to reduce spending. The savings mostly are wrung from health-care providers, not Medicare beneficiaries — who, as a result of the healthcare law, ended up with new benefits for preventive care and prescription drugs.”

A Congressional Leadership Fund official acknowledged that the ad was referring to the Medicare savings in the ACA, using numbers produced by the Congressional Budget Office in 2015 about the impact of repealing the law.

“The ad is not misleading at all,” the CLF official said. “Danny O’Connor does not support repealing the ACA, which would increase Medicare spending by more than $800 billion.”

The Medicare reductions in the ACA are the law of the land. In fact, Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration in their budget plans have pocketed virtually all of those savings — and sought even more reductions in Medicare spending on top of that.