Monday, February 21, 2011

Palin Wants Entitlement Reform

There has been a little back and forth today regarding entitlement reform. Earlier I suggested that there are only four national Republicans who have argued for entitlement reform. I did not include Sarah Palin. Right Wingnut responded by pointing out that Palin has endorsed Paul Ryan's plan and that she had earlier supported government vouchers to Medicare recipients.

I have been dismissive of Palin's comments regarding Medicare because she seems to be a mixed bag on entitlements. She spent the summer of 2009 leading the charge against cuts to Medicare, calling them "death panels." However, now that Obama has largely dismissed entitlement reform in his budget proposals, Palin has found her voice, decrying the President's lack of future planning.

While I find Palin to be somewhat hypocritical, I must say that she is not the only one who plays both sides of the fence. Romney has often differentiated his health care plan in MA from Obamacare by saying that in MA, "we didn't make cuts to Medicare."

So having said all of that, Palin deserves some credit for endorsing Ryan's plan. Anybody who endorses Ryan's plan is displaying some level of guts. Palin may be the only conservative who could make Ryan's plan popular among the Republican base and Fox News viewers. In that sense, we need Palin.

Now, what about Huckabee? I would love to hear his supporters tell us what he would do about Medicare. My guess is that Huckabee probably has the most pressure to not do anything since his following consists of a lot of Medicare recipients. But I wait to be corrected...

2 comments:

Bill589 said...

Pablo,
You are way off. Death panels have to do with rationing that appears to always occur with government run healthcare.

So there is no hypocrisy.

However, you are right about her having guts.

TexasConservative said...

Pablo, I appreciate your writings and your support of Mitt Romney.

But don't you think it is a little lazy to write a piece about one candidate's reform ideas and then challenge the supporters to go and find answers to the questions that you have about their candidate?

Wouldn't you be more effective if you did the digging and read through the internet and said I found this-is this what your candidate did in the past and what they are proposing for the future?

As to your question on Huckabee, his book comes out tomorrow. It is a detailed policy book. I am sure there is a whole chapter on entitlement reforms. Please go buy the book.

Why don't you read it and let us know what you think. See how it squares with your vision of a Daniels or a Christie or a Romney.