A critical comment about Medicare by vice presidential pick Paul Ryan was curiously edited out of the “60 Minutes” interview which aired on Sunday night,
HotAir.com reported.
Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and Ryan were interviewed for the program by Bob Schieffer of CBS News, who referred to a newspaper headline in Florida saying Ryan hurts Romney in the state because of his Medicare plan.
“There’s only one president that I know of in history that robbed Medicare, $716 billion to pay for a new risky program of his own that we call Obamacare,” Romney told Schieffer. “What Paul Ryan and I have talked about is saving Medicare, is providing people greater choice in Medicare, making sure it’s there for current seniors. No changes, by the way, for current seniors, or those nearing retirement. But looking for young people down the road and saying, ‘We’re going to give you a bigger choice.’ In America, the nature of this country has been giving people more freedom, more choices. That’s how we make Medicare work down the road.”
According to HotAir.com, the following remark by Ryan was cut and did not air but is crucial in explaining to viewers, especially Florida seniors, that his plan does not affect senior citizens and that his own mother is a Medicare senior.
“My mom is a Medicare senior in Florida,” Ryan said. “Our point is we need to preserve their benefits, because government made promises to them that they’ve organized their retirements around. In order to make sure we can do that, you must reform it for those of us who are younger. And we think these reforms are good reforms that have bipartisan origins. They started from the Clinton commission in the late ’90s.”
HotAir.com called the broadcast cut “journalistic malpractice.”
“Ryan’s plan doesn’t affect those already eligible for Medicare,” Ed Morrissey of HotAir.com wrote. “In fact, one of the conservative criticisms of the plan was that he didn’t give current Medicare recipients the option to choose a private-insurance plan, as younger Americans will get once they become eligible. That’s a pretty newsworthy detail, no?”
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