Picking up where he’d left off in the first debate, Obama warned his audience that Gov. Romney wanted to “turn Medicare into a voucher program.”
Pres. Obama had gone much further during the first debate by painting Romney’s vision of Medicare as something radically different from what Medicare has been from its inception up to the present. “The idea is that we would give a voucher to seniors and they could go out in the private marketplace and buy their own health insurance,” said Pres. Obama. However, the President continued, “the voucher wouldn’t necessarily keep up with health care inflation.” Pointing out how this might affect Medicare recipients’ bottom line, the President continued, “It was estimated that this would cost the average senior about $6,000 a year.”
While acknowledging during the first debate that Gov. Romney doesn’t plan to scrap traditional Medicare altogether, the President characterized his opponent’s Medicare proposals as an opportunity for future seniors “either to choose the current Medicare program or a private plan—their choice.”
Pres. Obama argued that “private insurance has to make a profit” and “when you move to a voucher system, you are putting seniors at the mercy of those insurance companies.”
The President suggested in the first debate that under the Romney-Ryan plan private insurance companies will seek out younger, healthier seniors, “leaving the older, sicker seniors in Medicare” and potentially spelling an end for traditional Medicare. “Every healthcare economist who looks at it says over time what’ll happen is the traditional Medicare system will collapse,” the President said.
Although both candidates were careful during the first debate to reassure current and near retirees that their Medicare benefits are secure, it might have been comforting to many seniors to hear such reassurance once more during the second debate. But, as various commentators have pointed out, the candidates seemed more often to be in a fighting mood than a reassuring one as the Oct. 16 debate played out. According to The Washington Post, there were even times that the second Romney vs Obama debate “felt more like a shouting match than a presidential debate.”
With the third and final 2012 presidential debate—Oct. 22 in Boca Raton, Fla.—set to focus primarily on foreign policy, it appears the last word may have been spoken by the candidates about senior healthcare as a 2012 election issue.