Fox's Neil Cavuto and his weekend show panel were terribly upset that HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said that seniors may die sooner under Rep. Paul Ryan and the GOP's budget plan during testimony before the House Education and the Workforce Committee this week.
Apparently their vote for Ryan's budget has got a lot of Republicans on edge and as Steve Benen noted, some of them are using the same talking points as the Fox pundits did here.
When Rep. Chris Lee (R) resigned in disgrace in February, few expected his seat to change party hands. His Buffalo-area district has been represented by Republicans for a long while, and national Democrats didn’t expect the special election to replace Lee to be competitive at all.
In March, the New York GOP rallied behind Jane Corwin, a well-liked state assemblywoman, and the race in the 26th congressional district appeared to be largely over.
And then a Siena College poll was published, showing Corwin’s lead at just five points over Democrat Kathy Hochul. What happened?
Part of the competitiveness is the result of Jack Davis, an odd millionaire, running as an independent and splitting the right. And the other part is Paul Ryan’s House Republican budget plan. [...]
At this point, the best the Republican campaign can come up with is the charge that Democrats “are trying to scare seniors.” But that’s awfully weak — it’s not demagoguery if it’s true, and if accurate descriptions of the GOP plan end up scaring people, that’s certainly not Democrats’ fault.
During this segment on Cavuto's show they were a bit long on fearmongering themselves and short on just what the details of Ryan's plan are, even though all of them continually maintained that the people attacking it don't know what's in it and need to go read it. And Steve is exactly right on the "scare tactic" talking point; that's a terribly weak argument. Seniors are afraid and upset because once they get a look at the GOP's budget plan and the details, they don't like it, not because they don't realize fully what it means for Medicare - privatizing it.
Of course the panel here just repeated the tired talking point that Medicare needs to be and handed over to the private insurance industry in order to "save it."
