Writing at Townhall.com, Guy Benson notes Obama adviser David Axelrod calling the fact that President Obama’s health care law cuts over half a trillion dollars from Medicare “a lie” by Republicans.

Of course, that’s not something that was made up by Republicans, but a statement from a report by the Congressional Budget Office. In fact, the CBO has pointed to hundreds of billions of cuts in Medicare in Democrats’ unpopular health care law, since before the bill was passed.

As Benson points out, even President Obama acknowledged this back in 2009 in an interview with Jake Tapper of ABC News. Tapper said to Obama, “One of the concerns about health care and how you pay for it — one third of the funding comes from cuts to Medicare.” Obama responds, “Right.”

Benson writes, “He wasn’t slashing $700 Billion out of (current, not future) Medicare to help that program remain solvent, mind you; he was, er, ‘re-allocating’ that money to help construct a brand new entitlement scheme.  The purpose of this eye-popping transfer of dollars, he says, was to ensure that Obamacare would not add a dime to the deficit.”

Republicans have pointed out that Obama and Democrats raided Medicare to pay for part of their new entitlement since before the law passed. Early in 2010, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said Republicans want “the administration to consider a new approach to reform, one that doesn’t cut Medicare to fund a trillion dollar takeover of the health care system or impose job-killing taxes in the middle of a recession . . . .”

As Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), one of the few doctors in the Senate, said in the Weekly Republican Address following the Supreme Court’s ruling on the health care law, “The President said he would protect Medicare—but instead he raided [over] $500 billion from our seniors on Medicare—not to strengthen Medicare—but to start a whole new government program for someone else. . . . Each broken promise proves that the Supreme Court’s ruling did absolutely nothing to improve the President’s failed health care law. It remains unworkable, unaffordable, and very unpopular. Americans deserve better. . . . There should be no doubt: Republicans in Congress will fight to repeal the President’s failed health care law.”

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