Biden attacks Republican budget plan in Ohio visit
MILFORD, Ohio — While the Romney campaign accused Vice President Joe Biden of peddling falsehoods Sunday in a four-city swing through southern Ohio about the Republican position on Medicare, the Obama campaign provided support for the Democrat’s claims.
Mr. Biden continued to savage his Republican opponents, Mitt Romney and running mate Paul Ryan, for allegedly failing to tell American voters details of Mr. Romney’s plans for Medicare and for reducing the debt.
Mr. Biden campaigned at Portsmouth High School and at Milford High School, both outside of Cincinnati.
He said in speeches, which weaved folksy asides in between
the populist policy points, that Republicans would cut benefits for Medicare beneficiaries and require recipients to reach into their own pockets to pay for benefits now covered entirely by Medicare.
Mr. Ryan’s proposal for reforming Medicare would convert it into a subsidy to buy private insurance for future beneficiaries — nobody older than 55 when the plan takes effect. Beneficiaries would still have the option of traditional Medicare.
“They don’t tell you that their plan would immediately cut benefits for 30 million seniors,” Mr. Biden said, and that under the Republican plan the Medicare trust fund will go bust in 2016.
Mr. Biden appeared to be basing his predictions of the impact on Medicare benefits on the fact that Republicans have said they would work to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
To support Mr. Biden’s claim, the Obama campaign cited an April report from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that said the Affordable Care Act extends the solvency of the hospital insurance trust fund to 2024, but without it the fund would be empty in 2016.
Chris Maloney, spokesman for the Romney campaign in Ohio, cited a Washington Post fact-checking article that questioned the accuracy of the 2016 trust fund bankruptcy.
“Despite the fact that multiple independent news agencies and fact checkers have taken up Joe Biden’s challenge and deemed his statements to be false, it appears as though he is willing to say anything to divert attention away from the Obama administration’s failed policies which have left more than 400,000 Ohioans looking for work,” Mr. Maloney said.
He cited Post writer Glenn Kessler, who wrote that one Medicare trust fund that pays hospitals “always seems to be on the edge of running dry. But even so, the payroll tax could pay most estimated expenditures for decades. And does anyone doubt Congress would not step in and fill any gaps?”
On Saturday, Mr. Biden urged the media covering him to “factcheck me!”
He blasted Republicans as not serious either about saving Medicare or curtailing the national debt, but primarily concerned with extending the Bush tax cuts and enacting additional tax cuts.
Mr. Biden said the Republican tax cut plan will lavish $500 billion worth of tax savings on 120,000 families, to be paid for with cuts in social programs, such as Medicaid and college Pell grants.
“Seniors would be kicked out of nursing homes. What are we going to do? A lot of those folks are moms and dads. They come from middle-class families. Even worse, some have no families, nowhere to go. What’s going to happen?” Mr. Biden said.
“They talk so much about the national debt, the great urgency, the need to act now,” he said. “Not once did they sign on if it required additional taxes for millionaires. Not once.”
Mr. Biden is to return to Ohio Wednesday for a rally at Wright State University in Dayton.
At the Milford rally, former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland said neither he nor current Republican Gov. John Kasich are the reason that Ohio’s unemployment rate is lower than the national jobless rate.
“President Obama and Vice President Biden saved the American auto industry,” Mr. Strickland said.
He also defended the administration on its coal record, saying the administration invested $5 billion in clean coal research, not mentioning it was a recent add to the administration’s energy policies after being accused by the coal industry of waging a “war on coal.”