Article • Dean Baker’s Beat the Press
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In pushing its editorial line that Social Security and Medicare must be cut the Post told readers in a news story that:
“Cantor acknowledged that any effort to solve the nation’s budget problems ‘is going to have to deal with entitlements’ – big, popular programs such as Social Security and Medicare (emphasis added).”
A real newspaper would have used a term like “asserted” or “claimed.” Of course it is not necessary to deal with programs like Medicare and Social Security to fix the country’s projected long-term budget problems as can be easily shown. It is necessary to fix the country’s health care system. If per person health care costs in the United States were comparable to costs in other wealthy countries then our budget problems would be easily manageable.