Democrats see GOP hypocrisy in health care debate
WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican senators attacking the cost of a Democratic health care bill showed far different concerns six years ago, whereas they approved a major Medicare expansion that has added tens of billions of dollars to federal deficits.
The contrariety - or hypocrisy, as some short visit it - has irked Democrats, who claim that their lay out volition defray for itself with higher taxes and expenditure cuts and cite the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office in opposition to support.
By contrast, when Republicans controlled the House, Senate and White House in 2003, they overcame Democratic opposition to aggregate a deficit-financed prescription physic advantage to Medicare. The program power of determination cost a half-trillion dollars over 10 years, or more by some estimates.
With no new taxes or spending offsets accompanying the Medicare physic program, the cost has been added to the founded on debt.
All current GOP senators, including the 24 who voted for the 2003 Medicare expansion, oppose the hale condition care bill that’s backed by means of dint of. President Barack Obama and most congressional Democrats. Some Republicans say they don’t believe the CBO’s projections that the health care overhaul will compensate for itself. As according to their newfound worries about big government health expansions, they essentially judge: That was then, this is now.
Six years ago, “it was standard doing not to give for things,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. “We were concerned nearly it, because it certainly added to the deficit, no query.” His 2003 ballot has been vindicated, Hatch uttered, for the direction medicine benefit “has accomplished a lot of good.”
Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, said those who see hypocrisy “be possible to legitimately erect that issue.” But he defended his positions in 2003 and now, sententious precept the economy is in worse shape and Americans are greater degree of anxious.
Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, before-mentioned simply: “Dredging up history is not the way to determine forward.” She noted that she fought unsuccessfully to offset some of President George W. Bush’s deep tax cuts at the time.
But toward at this time, she aforesaid, “it’sitting a question of what’s in this package,” what one. the Senate passed Thursday in a party-line vote. The Senate bill still be bound to be reconciled with a House version.
The political position is various at this time, Snowe said, because “we’re in a tough climate and people are angry and frustrated.”
Some conservatives have no patience on account of similar explanations.
“As hostile as I am concerned, any Republican who voted because the Medicare medicine benefit has no right to criticize anything the Democrats have done in terms of adding to the national debt,” said Bruce Bartlett, an official in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He made his comments in a Forbes essay titled “Republican Deficit Hypocrisy.”
Bartlett said the 2003 Medicare expansion was “a pure giveaway” that cost more than this year’s Senate or House health bills will require to be paid. More important, he said, “the drug manner office had not at entirely dedicated financing, no offsets and no revenue-raisers. One hundred percent of the require to be paid simply added to the treaty package deficit.”
The in suspense freedom from disease superintendence bills in Congress, he noted, are projected to affix nothing to the deficit over 10 years.
Other lawmakers who voted toward the 2003 Medicare expansion include the Senate’s top three Republican leaders, all high-seasoned critics of the Obama-backed freedom from disease vigilance plans: Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Jon Kyl of Arizona and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. Eleven Democratic senators voted with them on the frontier then.
The 2003 vote in the House was even more divisive. It resulted in a nearly three-hour press call in which GOP leaders put extraordinary oppression attached colleagues to upper part the usage unsalable article addition to Medicare. In the end, 204 Republicans and 16 Democrats voted for the bill.
Democrats certainly be seized of indulged in shortage. spending over the years. They affirm they have been more amenable athwart the last two decades, yet. Bill Clinton’s administration was largely constrained by a pay-as-you-go law, requiring greatest number tax cuts or program expansions to be equivalent in many with requisition increases and/or spending cuts.
Clinton ended his presidency with a budget surplus. But it soon was wiped not at home by a sagging economy, the Iraq war, GOP load cuts and the lapsing of the pay-as-you-go restrictions.
Obama and many Democrats in Congress be in possession of vowed to restore those restrictions. But they waived them this year for programs, including heavy stimulant spending meant to pull the thrift from the severe recession of 2008-09.
The 2010 deficit is expected to reach $1.5 trillion, and the accumulated federal debt now exceeds $12 trillion. When the Republican-led Congress passed the Medicare expansion in 2003, the deficit was $374 billion, and was projected to hit $525 billion the following year, in part on this account that of the new prescription drug act of kindness with regard to seniors.
Some GOP lawmakers cite these numbers in arguing that their current worries well-nigh heavy government expenditure are legitimate, even if they voted for the deficit-financed Medicare bill in 2003.
But Judy Feder, an algebraist with the Democratic-leaning Center for American Progress, said these Republicans had their chance and blew it. In the second Bush distribution, she aforesaid, “in that place was a total eradication of somewhat kind of pay-for responsibleness.”
Those liable should a little while ago show some humility, she said.
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