Ramesh Ponnuru's Bloomberg "consultant letter" to House Republicans on Medicare is worth the read and keeps up the "talking point" trend we played with today. Here's a great section:
If you keep at it, you might be prepared for the onslaught of negative ads you’re going to face after Labor Day in 2012. Maybe you’ll even get some people who still worry about the plan to see that you’ve thought it through carefully -- that you’re being reasonable and responsible, and not just taking an axe to an important program for the fun of it.
That means you’ll need to do more homework than most of my clients like to do. Sorry about that. It’s what happens when you decide to take on a complicated issue over strong opposition. I can give you one more bit of advice to lighten your load. When you’re talking about Medicare, at those town halls or in interviews, don’t say that the alternative is bankruptcy and that the Democrats want to do nothing.
No, the alternative is heavy-handed bureaucratic cost- cutting. The Democratic plan is cutting payment rates so that Medicare becomes as lousy a program as Medicaid, with doctors refusing to participate in it. The Democratic plan is letting an unelected board decide which treatments won’t get funded.
The whole article is here.
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