During the 2008 presidential campaign, then-Sen. Barack Obama attacked John McCain for proposing Medicare cuts similar to the ones he enacted and is now being criticized for by Mitt Romney.
As reported in a Huffington Post article that the Romney campaign circulated to reporters Tuesday, Obama bashed McCain in an ad and on the stump for proposing $800 billion in Medicare savings.
McCain’s proposed cuts, like Obama’s $700 billion, did not affect Medicare benefits. According to a Wall Street Journal article at the time, McCain’s senior adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin “said the Medicare and Medicaid changes would improve the programs and eliminate fraud, but he didn’t detail where the cuts would come from.”
Republican National Committee spokesman Tim Miller piled on in an email Tuesday.
“In 2008, Obama attacked McCain for supposedly proposing to cut Medicare to pay for health care,” he wrote. “Then, as president, Obama did just that. More evidence his political demagoguery on Medicare can’t be trusted.”
McCain’s embrace of the cuts in 2008 reflect the bipartisan nature of finding savings within the program, which was also affirmed after congressional Republicans voted to keep the cuts in Paul Ryan’s budget blueprint.
