I just caught this statement in an editorial in the St. Louis Post Dispatch on the latest health care reform proposals. 

“How can covering more people actually wind up reducing the deficit?
The answer is that health care reform lays the groundwork for transformational changes to the way Medicare — and, ultimately, all insurance companies — pay doctors and hospitals.”

Would you like to hear what people were saying when George Bush proposed Medicare cuts?

From the New York Times: 

The proposals “would undermine our ability to train young doctors at a time when the nation is facing a shortage of doctors,” [Kenneth E. Raske, president of the Greater New York Hospital Association] said.

“Under the proposal,” [William A. Dombi, vice president of the National Association for Home Care and Hospice]Mr. Dombi said, “75 percent to 80 percent of home health agencies would be doomed. They would not be able to meet payroll. They would not be able to operate.”

From The Washington Post:  

"This administration ought to know that five years' worth of Medicare and Medicaid cuts totaling $200 billion are dead on arrival with me and with most of the Congress," Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, told the Associated Press.

"President Bush's proposed cuts to Medicare would hurt older and disabled Americans and take a wrecking ball to many essential hospitals across the country," Robert M. Hayes, president of the Medicare Rights Center, said in a prepared statement. "It is indefensible for the President to propose hurting America's grandparents while maintaining his rabid defense of Medicare overpayments to for-profit health insurance companies."

Note that the cuts George Bush proposed in 2008 were $200 billion.  In 2009, Sen. Max Dead-On-Arrival Baucus proposed cuts in Medicare/Medicaid/SCHIP of $404 billion.  

So we can add something new to our political lexicon:

• If a Republican proposes Medicare cuts, it is “a wrecking ball” that will “hurt older and disabled Americans” and doom “75 percent to 80 percent of home health agencies.”
• If a Democrat proposes even bigger Medicare cuts, it is “health care reform” that “lays the groundwork for transformational changes.”