The Republicans’ super committee proposal to reduce the deficit would make much deeper cuts to Medicare and Medicaid and achieve less deficit reduction that the plan offered by Democrats last week, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) concludes in a new report. For instance, “four-fifths of the Republicans’ proposed Medicare cuts— $400 billion — would directly affect beneficiaries through higher premiums, higher cost sharing, and more restrictive eligibility criteria,” while Democrats include $200 billion in reductions to beneficiaries.

As a result, the GOP’s plan — when coupled with the reductions to Medicaid — would substantially impact lower-income beneficiaries:

Since half of Medicare beneficiaries had incomes below $21,100 in 2010, it would be virtually impossible to achieve this level of beneficiary cuts without imposing substantial increases in out-of-pocket costs on near-poor elderly and disabled people — those between 100 and 200 percent of the poverty line (about $11,000 to $22,000 for an individual). Yet the typical Medicare beneficiary in this income range already pays 23 percent of income for out-of-pocket costs, a percentage that would increase significantly under both plans — especially under the Republican plan. [...]

The Republican plan also would make far deeper cuts in Medicaid — $185 billion versus $75 billion over ten years under the Democratic plan. Cuts of this depth would shift substantial costs to state governments, which would lead to state actions that limit care for the low-income children, parents, seniors, and people with disabilities whom Medicaid serves.

Look:

During a roundtable with voters in Iowa this morning, Rick Santorum explained how Paul Ryan’s plan to privatize the Medicare program for future enrollees would “ration” care to seniors by capping the amount of money beneficiaries would have to spend on health care services:

SANTORUM: There will be a rationing of care, there has to be. There is a rationing of every economic resource. There is not unlimited amounts of money to spend on anything…[Obama] has put a cap. Now, that’s one way of solving the problem. The other way of solving the problem is to put a cap in a different place and what Paul Ryan suggested and I believe in — in fact advocated for in 2003 as part of Medicare….which is putting a cap on the amount of money we give you to buy your own insurance. So instead of capping the overall budget and making you wait, thinking you got a card, but the card isn’t going to be worth anything, because you got to wait for it, we’re going to put the cap on the other end — on you.

Watch it:

Santorum attempted to establish equivalency between the Affordable Care Act’s Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) — a 15-member commission that would make recommendations to Congress about lowering Medicare reimbursements if costs increase beyond a certain point — and Ryan’s plan to “limit the government’s exposure” by giving seniors pre-determined vouchers with which to purchase private coverage. But the differences couldn’t be greater: while health reform will begin to change not just how much providers are paid for their services, but how they’re paid for delivering them, the Ryan plan shifts simply some of the costs borne by the federal government to the individual without improving the system’s efficiency or removing its many redundancies. As a result, the federal “cap” that Ryan imposes will fail to keep up with skyrocketing health care spending and force seniors to pay more for the same package of benefits every year.

After an exhausting number of flip-flops on the issue, GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain once again changed his position on a woman’s right to choose. Asked at the National Press Club under what circumstances abortions should be allowed, Cain reiterated, “I am pro-life, from conception. End of story.” This is what he’s held all along. However, when asked whether he’d back legislation that bans abortions without exceptions, he said, “Yes I would.” Watch it:

This is in direct conflict with his own campaign, which insisted that he — like President George W. Bush — supported exceptions for rape, incest, and to save the life of the mother. When asked whether he’d support such a ban on the state or federal level, he said, “I can’t determine the state level, but I would support that at a federal level if that legislation were to come to my desk.” This, incidentally, also contradicts his statement that he’d sign a constitutional amendment that would mandate an abortion ban on all states.

Conservative blogs and Fox News lit up this weekend after House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told CNBC on Friday that the businesses that received government waivers from the Affordable Care Act are “small,” gleefully pointing out that large corporations like McDonalds also applied for and were granted exemptions. Watch the segment:

The story perpetuates two important Republican myths — one completely unsubstantiated and refuted charge that Democrats inappropriately influenced HHS to grant waivers to politically-connected unions or companies in Pelosi’s district, and the second that the waivers themselves are proof that the law is not working as intended.

The waivers — some 1,800 in all — are part of the law itself and speak more to its success than failure. The ACA provides HHS with flexibility to grant businesses and states additional time to comply with the law’s requirements, permitting these entities to gradually transition beneficiaries from subprime insurance into more comprehensive basic coverage. In other words, the waivers are a bridge to 2014: businesses with insurance plans that are structured in such a way as to make it impossible to meet the regulations surrounding annual limits and medical loss ratios will have additional time to redesign their benefit packages and won’t dump coverage for their existing employees before they can enroll in insurance through the state-based exchanges.

If anything, the flexibility that waivers provide undermines the GOP’s main criticism against reform — that the ACA is a one-size-fits-all law designed by bureaucrats without taking the needs of business into consideration. And conservatives are now pretending that in following the letter of the law, the administration is actually allowing businesses to circumvent it.

More than a hundred members of both parties are urging the super committee to avoid tinkering with the employer tax subsidy for health care coverage, warning that any changes to the long-standing system “would have far reaching consequences that would not only reduce health coverage for millions of Americans, but would also increase long-term federal spending obligations,” the Hill’s Julian Pecquet reports. From the letter:

Considering the tax exclusion is the lynchpin of this framework, capping or eliminating it would erode our largest system of health coverage and incentivize employers to drop or to curtail coverage. For their workforce, substitute coverage would only be available through the individual market, where comparable coverage is more expensive for most consumers– even as new options become available under the Affordable Care Act. And, due to the realities in our insurance system, the change would impact more vulnerable demographics of working Americans to a greater degree than others. [...]

A study on the high-cost health plan tax conducted by the American Academy of Actuaries concluded that the proposal would disproportionately impact early retirees by a striking margin, not because their plans are more generous, but because they are actuarially more expensive to cover. The report also concluded that small businesses and high-risk professions would also be disproportionately impacted, again, not based on generosity of benefits, but because of longstanding actuarial realities.

The GOP’s opposition to ending the tax exclusion is significant, since several prominent Republicans have proposed replacing the Affordable Care Act with a “market based” health care solution that ends the employer tax subsidy and provides tax credits that would allow families and individuals to purchase health insurance coverage on the individual market. Republicans in the House also voted for a very similar plan in 2009 as part of their alternative to Obama’s health reform legislation.

During a speech at the Heritage Foundation earlier this month, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) strongly came out against the idea, arguing that such a proposal would “disrupt this whole country.”