Despite almost doubling the budget deficit with a tax cut package focused on corporations and high income earners, Republicans have embraced socialist programs like social security, medicare, and even the medicaid expansion prior to midterm elections.

>Republicans on Capitol Hill are giving up on what might be their last best chance to overhaul Medicare, just as they’re losing their leading champion on the issue, House Speaker Paul Ryan.

>The quiet surrender on a subject that’s energized GOP fiscal hawks for the better part of a decade comes as new projections show Medicare’s trust fund in its worst shape since the recession, partly because of Republicans’ other chief obsession: their sweeping tax cuts.

>That’s left conservatives unsure how to agitate for a politically unpopular Medicare overhaul — one that President Donald Trump detests — and raises new questions about who will take up the entitlement reform mantle as Ryan heads for the exits.

>“It takes two houses of Congress and a president to want to do that,” said Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), lamenting the party’s apathy over Medicare. “No matter who’s been in the House or who’s been speaker, we have not been able to get entitlement reform done.”

>The sudden silence on entitlements is an awkward one for congressional Republicans, who spent much of the Obama administration calling for major reforms and new limits on spending. Without that, they warned, Democrats’ agenda would blow up the deficit and bankrupt Medicare, a program that serves nearly 60 million seniors and people with disabilities.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/15/republicans-medicare-overhaul-abandoned-623203