CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE RYAN PLAN FULL

Romney, April 4: As I look at what the president said, there were just so many things that I found to be distortions and inaccuracies it’s hard to give a full list. A day later, Romney spoke to the same group of editors and was asked about the president’s speech. Obama launched his attack on the House Republican budget in an April 3 speech to newspaper editors. Ryan’s plan would require private insurance companies to take all comers, regardless of their condition, and it includes risk-adjustments to give incentive payments to plans that end up covering less healthy individuals. But the president’s claim that the plan would herd older, sicker patients into traditional Medicare isn’t necessarily true.

Obama also attacked the Republican budget’s plan to give seniors premium-support payments and a choice between traditional Medicare and private plans, beginning in 2023.

But that deal called for automatic cuts only if Congress could not agree on another way to achieve the required amount of deficit reduction, or more.

Obama says that the Republican budget “breaks our bipartisan agreement and proposes massive new cuts in annual domestic spending.” It’s true that Ryan’s plan calls for smaller cuts in military spending, and deeper cuts in domestic programs, than the bipartisan deal struck last year to allow an increase in the debt limit.

Paul Ryan, author of the GOP plan, insists his plan makes “dozens of specific assumptions to justify our numbers.” But the fact is details are scarce, and the president is mostly correct when he complains that Republicans “don’t specify exactly the cuts that they would make.” Obama’s list of popular programs that would be slashed or even eliminated assumes “these cuts were to be spread out evenly.” But the GOP plan does not make across-the-board cuts, so Obama’s examples are largely speculation and based on an incorrect premise.So who’s right? We find grounds to fault both sides. Romney says that’s just “rhetorical excess” and accuses the president of “many … distortions and inaccuracies.” President Obama says Mitt Romney has embraced a budget that could throw hundreds of thousands of children out of Head Start classrooms, eliminate air traffic control services in some places, and “ultimately end Medicare as we know it.”

Congressional budget office ryan plan