In Florida, Obama criticizes Romney over Medicare

Pres­i­dent Barack Obama speaks at a cam­paign event at the Prime Osborn Con­ven­tion Cen­ter in Jack­sonville, Fla., Thurs­day. Obama is spend­ing two days in Florida cam­paign­ing. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

KEN THOMAS, STEVE PEOPLES

Asso­ci­ated Press

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Woo­ing Florida vot­ers, Pres­i­dent Barack Obama warned Thurs­day that Repub­li­can chal­lenger Mitt Rom­ney would gut his health care reform law and turn Medicare into a voucher pro­gram, dri­ving up costs for the elderly on fixed incomes. Rom­ney, fir­ing away near his Boston home base, accused Obama of car­ing only about sav­ing his own job — not the jobs of Americans.

In the daily war of words in an up-for-grabs pres­i­den­tial con­test, health care pol­i­tics took top billing as Obama opened two days of cam­paign­ing in Florida, the largest and most cov­eted of the nation’s Elec­tion Day toss-up states. Obama could see his chances for another term seri­ously dam­aged if Rom­ney pre­vails here.

For his part, Rom­ney, in hastily arranged remarks to reporters near Boston, kept the focus on the slug­gish eco­nomic recov­ery under Obama’s watch. He cited new gov­ern­ment fig­ures show­ing that the num­ber of Amer­i­can seek­ing unem­ploy­ment ben­e­fits rose by 34,000 last week, a fig­ure that may have been skewed higher by sea­sonal factors.

Both can­di­dates were pour­ing most of their money and atten­tion into the col­lec­tion of fewer than 10 states expected to decide the elec­tion. First lady Michelle Obama launched a new effort to rally sup­port­ers behind her hus­band, try­ing to light a fire by say­ing the whole race could “come down to just a few votes per precinct in key states.”

Nowhere is the cam­paign poten­tially more piv­otal than in Florida, which decided the 2000 elec­tion and remains the ulti­mate swing state. With a large pool of retired vot­ers, Medicare has been used by both par­ties to rally sup­port from seniors in Florida and else­where, mostly by warn­ing that the other party had in mind changes that would curb the national insur­ance pro­gram for older Americans.

Obama sought to broaden his attack on Romney’s sup­port for a House Repub­li­can plan that would shift Medicare from a fee-for-service pro­gram into one where future retirees buy insur­ance using sub­si­dies. Repub­li­cans say it would intro­duce com­pe­ti­tion and give seniors more choices, but it is closely watched in Florida, where about half of the 2008 elec­torate was age 50 and older.

“He plans to turn Medicare into a voucher pro­gram,” Obama said at West Palm Beach’s Cen­tury Vil­lage, home to thou­sands of Demo­c­ra­tic retirees from New York, New Jer­sey and else­where. “If the voucher isn’t worth what it takes to buy health insur­ance in the pri­vate mar­ket­place, you’re out of luck. You’ve got to make up the dif­fer­ence. You’re on your own.”

Rom­ney would pro­vide sub­si­dies — Democ­rats call them vouch­ers — to help future retirees buy pri­vate insur­ance, or let them have the option of tra­di­tional Medicare, with a grad­u­ally increas­ing age to qual­ify for ben­e­fits. Cur­rent retirees would not be affected.

“(Obama) has offered no seri­ous plan of his own to save Medicare and is con­tent to use it as noth­ing more than a polit­i­cal issue,” said Lan­hee Chen, the Rom­ney campaign’s pol­icy director.

Rom­ney has crit­i­cized Obama’s health care law, not­ing that Obama calls for $500 bil­lion in cuts to Medicare. But Obama would make most of those cuts by reduc­ing pay­ments to ser­vice providers such as hos­pi­tals and nurs­ing homes, not beneficiaries.

Under the health care law, Medicare cov­er­age would improve for those with high pre­scrip­tion costs, and would require no copay­ments for pre­ven­tive care.

Dur­ing stops in Jack­sonville and in West Palm Beach, Obama jumped on Romney’s oppo­si­tion to his health care reform law, which was recently upheld by the Supreme Court. He said the for­mer Mass­a­chu­setts governor’s approach would force more than 200,000 Florid­i­ans pay more for their pre­scrip­tion drugs.

“It’s wrong to ask you to pay more for Medicare so that peo­ple who are doing well right now get even more,” Obama told seniors at Cen­tury Vil­lage. “That’s no way to reduce the deficit. We shouldn’t be squeez­ing more money out of seniors.”

For Obama, who has fre­quently strug­gled to build sup­port among elderly vot­ers, the health care pitch was directed at retirees in Florida, home to the all-important prize of 29 elec­toral votes. Even in win­ning here in 2008, Obama lost to John McCain among vot­ers 65 and older.

Back in Mass­a­chu­setts, Rom­ney again crit­i­cized Obama for not hav­ing met with his advi­sory jobs coun­cil in six months while hold­ing more than 100 fundrais­ers in that time. White House spokesman Jay Car­ney had said Wednes­day that the pres­i­dent gets advice from the coun­cil all the time but also has “got a lot on his plate.”

“I think you’ve learned some­thing about the president’s pri­or­i­ties,” Rom­ney said. “The job he’s inter­ested in pro­tect­ing is his own.”

The White House sought to counter that line of attack by show­ing pres­i­den­tial action. Obama’s admin­is­tra­tion announced it was speed­ing up expan­sion projects at five major U.S. ports, includ­ing two in polit­i­cally impor­tant Florida. Car­ney made a point to note that the idea came from Obama’s jobs council.

In speak­ing to a largely Jew­ish audi­ence in West Palm Beach, Obama said the nation was “heart­bro­ken” over the ter­ror­ist attack launched against Israeli tourists in Bul­garia and said his admin­is­tra­tion hadn’t “just pre­served the unbreak­able bond with Israel, we have strength­ened it.”

As Obama stuck to his eco­nomic mes­sage, his cam­paign kept up its aggres­sive attempt to raise doubts about Romney’s trust­wor­thi­ness. Obama and his sur­ro­gates have been push­ing Rom­ney to release more than two years of tax returns. Some mem­bers of Romney’s party have agreed, although oth­ers say the idea is a distraction.

“We’ve given all you peo­ple need to know and under­stand about our finan­cial sit­u­a­tion and about how we live our life,” Romney’s wife, Ann, told ABC News in an inter­view broad­cast Thursday.

In a sep­a­rate inter­view aired Thurs­day on WTOL-TV in Toledo, Ohio, Rom­ney said one rea­son not to release more of his returns was that “the Demo­c­ra­tic Party and the oppo­si­tion has all these peo­ple that comb through and try and find any­thing they can to dis­tract from the issues peo­ple care about, often­times in a dis­hon­est way.”

Posted by AP News on Jul 19 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.