Conservative group indicates disappointment in Senate GOP budget

{mosads}”Heritage Action strongly believes that in order to save Medicare, we must reform it now,” said chief executive officer Michael A. Needham. “The program’s unsustainable future is impossible to ignore.”

He went on to credit Toomey’s proposal for placing “some positive ideas on the table, including bold cuts on the discretionary spending side.”

Rather than suggesting ways to rein in Medicare, sponsors of the budget actually touted it as spending more on the program than both the House GOP budget and the one offered by the White House.

“Senator Toomey has now allocated more money for Medicare than the president did,”said Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), one of the budget’s cosponsors. “If you want to look at a real cut in Medicare, look at the president’s plan.”

The Senate proposal would balance the budget in a fraction of the time required by the House GOP proposal crafted by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), which does not project a budget surplus until 2040.

However, Ryan’s plan does propose an overhaul to Medicare, converting the program into subsidies that can be used to buy private insurance. Polls have indicated that changes to entitlement programs are not publicly popular, and Democrats often singled out the changes to Medicare as a common critique of the proposal.