Just before President Joe Biden’s visit to Florida on Thursday, one of the state’s Republican senators, Rick Scott, repeated a false claim about Biden and Medicare – a claim that was debunked by multiple news outlets when Scott and a Scott-chaired Republican organization uttered it during the 2022 midterm campaign.
Scott made the claim both in an interview with “CNN This Morning” co-anchor Kaitlan Collins on Thursday morning and in a television ad he released online on Wednesday. The ad came out the morning after Biden used part of his State of the Union address to warn Americans about Scott’s proposal to require “all” federal laws, which would include Medicare, to expire after five years if they are not renewed by Congress; Biden repeated this warning in a speech in Tampa on Thursday.
Scott, who says he does not want to cut Medicare, tried to turn the tables on Biden by beginning the ad with an accusation: “Joe Biden just cut $280 billion from Medicare.” On “CNN This Morning” on Thursday, Scott said, “Let’s remember – just, what, a few months ago, all Democrats voted, and Joe Biden signed a bill, to cut $280 billion out of Medicare.”
Collins immediately and repeatedly challenged Scott with the facts. Scott refused to budge. But Collins was correct: this claim about Democrats having supposedly cut Medicare is highly deceptive.
Facts First: While Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act is expected to reduce Medicare prescription drug spending by the federal government – by $237 billion over a decade, according to the most recent Congressional Budget Office estimate – that’s because the law will allow the government to spend less to buy drugs from pharmaceutical companies, not because the law will cut benefits to seniors enrolled in Medicare. The law actually makes Medicare’s prescription drug program more generous to seniors while also…
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