Via Twitter, David Phillippe pointed out today that Paul Ryan has directly contradicted Mitt Romney on how to extend the solvency of Medicare. At issue are cuts to Medicare included in both Obamacare and the House GOP budget engineered by Ryan, which now total $716 billion over the current budget window. Mitt Romney told CBS on Wednesday he would undo those cuts and restore Medicare’s payments to their prior level, and claimed this move would extend the program’s solvency:

ROMNEY: The president’s cuts of $716 billion to Medicare, those cuts are going to be restored if I become president and Paul Ryan becomes vice president… My commitment is, if I become president, I’m going to restore that $716 billion to the Medicare trust fund so that current seniors can know that trust fund is not being raided and we’re going to make sure – and get Medicare on track to be solvent long-term on a permanent basis.

Meanwhile, Ezra Klein notes that back in July, Paul Ryan told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that the exact opposite approach would extend solvency:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Your own budget, which Governor Romney has endorsed, would also have [$716 billion] in Medicare cuts.

RYAN: Well our budget keeps that money for Medicare to extend its solvency. What Obamacare does is it takes that money from Medicare to spend on Obamacare.

Paul Ryan has the right of it — maintaining these cuts will extend the solvency of Medicare’s trust fund, while undoing the cuts as Romney insists will shorten its solvency. That’s because the cuts do not target seniors’ benefits, but rather the payment rates to health care providers. Overpayments to private insurers in Medicare Advantage are trimmed, overall provider payments are reformed to encourage efficiency, and reimbursements are tied to improved economic performance.

Since the securities flowing into the trust fund come from the payroll tax, which is not cut, the funding remains the same while the services-per-dollar those funds can purchase goes up. As a result, the solvency of Medicare’s trust fund is extended, and the gap over the next 75 years between Medicare’s funding and its expected payments shrinks.

Of course, Ryan’s implication that Obamacare uses the money from the cuts to pay for its own spending instead of extending Medicare’s solvency is also wrong. Trust fund accounting, which deals with Medicare’s solvency, is a conceptually separate framework from the unified budget accounting under which Obamacare’s spending falls. It’s perfectly feasible for the same cut to make room for new spending under the latter, while simultaneously improving Medicare’s solvency under the former. As Paul N. Van de Water put it, “That’s no different than when a baseball player hits a home run: it adds to his team’s score and also improves his batting average.”

So Romney contradicts Ryan on whether these cuts extend Medicare’s solvency, and both incorrectly claim Obamacare fails to do so. Welcome to politics.

While stumping for Mitt Romney in Ohio Wednesday, former presidential hopeful Rick Santorum repeated allegations of President Obama’s so-called “War on Religion,” claiming that Catholics’ freedom of religion is being compromised by the implementation of Obamacare. According to Santorum, whose campaign emphasized his far-right social values, Catholics are being forced to sin by complying with an Obamacare provision that requires employers to provide contraceptive services free of charge:

SANTORUM: We have a president who, for the first time in American history, is directly assaulting the First Amendment and freedom of religion. He is going to tell you what to do in the practice of your faith. He is forcing business people right now to do things that are against their conscience, that they will have to — if you’re a Catholic — you’ll have to go to confession … to confess that you are complying with a government program that is a sin in the Catholic Church.

The former Pennsylvania senator’s charges of Obamacare’s affront to religious liberty echo the conservative Catholic leaders who have been fighting against the birth control provision for the past several months. Dozens of Catholic institutions filed a joint lawsuit against the new contraception regulation, which went into effect on August 1.

However, the Catholic case against the contraception mandate is easily dismantled. The exception the provision includes for religious institutions has been widely accepted as a valid compromise that provides women with contraception through outside insurers, so Catholic-affiliated institutions do not have to pay for the cost of birth control if they object to it. Federal judges have already begun to throw out lawsuits against Obamacare, pointing out that there is no compelling evidence of religious discrimination inherent to the law. And in spite of the fabricated controversy over sinful birth control coverage, many large Catholic universities covered contraceptive services even before the health reform law required them to do so.

Last March, Republican lawmakers in Texas blocked funding for the state’s Planned Parenthood clinics, mandating that the organizations in the Texas’ Women’s Health Program shouldn’t receive federal funds because they are “affiliated” with an abortion provider. Despite the fact that abortion services contribute to just 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s nationwide health services, and federal funding isn’t used to finance that small percentage, Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) slashed the Texas Women’s Health Program’s funds by 90 percent.

Months later, the consequences of those deep cuts extend far beyond Planned Parenthood itself. The Texas Observer notes that clinics in rural areas have been forced to suspend the family planning services they used to provide for low-income women, many of whom can’t otherwise afford oral contraceptives, pregnancy tests, pap smears, or screening for sexually transmitted diseases:

In the year since deep cuts to family planning funding took effect, the impact has become apparent. An Observer review of state records has found that 146 clinics have lost state funds, clumped mainly in the Panhandle, Central Texas and on the border with Mexico. More than 60 of those clinics have closed their doors forever. The number of organizations that help poor women plan pregnancy has shrunk by almost half. As in San Saba, low-income women in many areas of Texas now face a long drive, or worse, lack of access to birth control and health screenings.

In fact, of the more than 60 clinics that have closed across Texas, only 12 were run by Planned Parenthood. Dozens of other clinics unconnected to Planned Parenthood nonetheless lost state funds and have closed, leaving low-income women in wide swaths of the state without access to contraception. [...]

Indeed, the bipartisan Legislative Budget Board estimated that last year’s cuts would lead to more than 250,000 women losing services and 20,000 additional births covered by Medicaid. When The Texas Observer asked providers what they thought about the cuts, several mentioned the same phrase. They said in hoping to punish Planned Parenthood, politicians had gone too far, with devastating consequences for women’s health. Lawmakers, they said, had thrown the “baby out with the bath water.”

Among the health clinics that have managed to remain open, many have been forced to contract their geographic range, limiting services to a smaller population of Texas women. Regardless of affiliation to Planned Parenthood, limiting health clinics’ ability to provide critical health services to low-income women does not have the intended consequence of targeting abortion providers. Rather, Perry’s drastic cuts to the Women’s Health Program are preventing struggling women from getting access to the care they need.

Throughout the political battles over the War on Women, Planned Parenthood has become a buzzword for anti-choice Republicans who seek to equate Planned Parenthood clinics with death and destruction. However, the real destruction is wreaked when overarching, politically-motivated attacks on women’s health providers leave low-income women with no affordable contraceptive options, no available STI tests, no regular cancer screenings, and no control over their reproductive health.

This week, the Romney/Ryan campaign has twisted itself into a pretzel attacking President Obama for “stealing” $716 billion from Medicare, while trying to explain why Paul Ryan included the savings in his FY 2013 budget.

The infographic below offers a rundown of the campaign’s contortions from Sunday’s proclamations that Romney would have signed the Ryan budget and its Medicare cuts into law, to Romney’s announcement on Tuesday that he would restore the Medicare savings that both Ryan and Obama supported:

The changing rhetoric also presents serious policy problems. Romney’s implied policy of steering clear of Medicare reductions would greatly complicate his goal of reducing all federal spending from 24 percent of the GDP to 20 percent by 2016, which would require unsustainable cuts to other government programs. His specific promise to restore the $716 billion will also backfire and shorten the life of the Medicare trust fund “toward the end of what would be his first term in office.” The campaign has not yet specified how it would extend its solvency.

Infographic design by Adam Peck.