http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/no-dice-to-medicaid-cuts.html No Dice
by digby
I have long felt that it was unlikely that the President would allow substantial cuts to health care programs, since it is his signature issue. But since everyone in DC has come down with Deficit Fever, I've become a little bit worried that he might be coerced into cutting Medicaid since it's seen by many people as a "welfare" program and who likes that? (This was why I was always more worried about Social Security --- it's not a health care program and so less likely to be protected by the president in a Grand Bargain.)
If Gene Sperling's words this morning are any indication, the White House is not going to use health care as a bargaining chip:
He said Mr. Ryan has “put himself in a box” with his unwillingness to raise tax revenue. He said this forced Republicans to call for “very severe cuts” that if “explored” by Americans “they would not be proud of.”
Mr. Sperling attacked the House Republican proposals to overhaul Medicare and Medicaid, saying that the $770 billion in savings Republicans wanted from changing Medicaid would be unneccessary if Republicans would agree to roll back certain tax cuts.
“You can’t say to anybody who would be affected by that, that we have to do that, that we have no choice,” he said. “The fact is that all of those savings would be unnecessary if you were not funding the high income tax cuts.”
He also said that Mr. Ryan was wrong when he said that raising taxes as part of a broader package would hurt economic growth.
“Everything he said I heard nine million times in 1993,” said Mr. Sperling, who was NEC deputy director in the Clinton administration and later became Mr. Clinton’s national economic adviser.
This is really important. Sperling has ben one of the foremost proponents of the Grand Bargain and this pretty unequivocally takes Medicaid cuts off the table.
It will always be vulnerable --- whenever the Republicans get the chance they will try to cut Medicaid, especially once it is expanded to cover more people. They will be desperate to call it a welfare program that somehow is keeping people from being productive members of society. But if the Dems can at least protect what exists now and get the expansion enacted it will be harder. Sperling's comments were terribly important in that it positioned it as a safety net program that helps the middle class as much as the poor and I'm not sure most people know that
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