GOP Revives Medicare Tactics as Election Nears

With the midterm election drawing near and voters going to the polls to decide between candidates, President Trump and other members of the Republican Party are contending that Democrats' support for expanding Medicare would threaten the viability of the program for beneficiaries, reports NPR . "The Democrats' plan means that after a life of hard work and sacrifice, seniors would no longer be able to depend on the benefits they were promised," President Trump wrote in a recent guest column for USA Today . Numerous GOP candidates have made similar statements that have drawn the ire of fact checkers like Linda Blumberg of the Urban Institute. She recently told PolitiFact that suggesting Medicare-for-all would disrupt current beneficiaries' coverage is a "horrible mischaracterization of the proposal," while the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler noted that a leading proposal "in theory would expand benefits for seniors." Harvard University Professor Robert Blendon says the Republicans' renewed focus on Medicare is predicated on the fact that "people over 60 are very high-turnout voters," especially in non-presidential election years.