Rick Scott trades barbs with ‘clueless’ Biden over Medicare spending

“He says that because I’m cutting prescription drug costs, that means I’m cutting Medicare. Where’s he been?” Biden asked a crowd at a union facility in Maryland. “We’re saving Medicare hundreds of billions of dollars over time.”

Biden’s jab is the latest in a war of words between Scott and the president, who alleges that the senator wants to put Medicare and Social Security “on the chopping block.”

RICK SCOTT RELEASES ATTACK AD AFTER BIDEN CLAIMS GOP WANTS TO CUT MEDICARE

Scott released a 12-point policy agenda last year that calls for all federal legislation, which includes the popular social programs, to “sunset” unless renewed every five years. The senator loudly denies that he wants to cut Medicare and Social Security and announced a bill on Friday that would require a two-thirds vote for Congress to pass any law paring back benefits.

Asked about the president’s Wednesday remarks, Scott called Biden a “hypocrite” and said he is sending the country down a path of financial ruin with the deficit spending of the last two years.

“Tell me how spending money like that, running big deficits, is going to preserve Medicare and Social Security. It’s not,” he told the Washington Examiner in an exclusive interview. “So, the president doesn’t understand what he does. As we all know, he’s clueless about what he does.”

Andrew Harnik/AP

Scott, a member of the fiscally conservative “Breakfast Club,” has spent his first term in the Senate railing against the trillion-dollar spending bills Democrats passed last Congress when they controlled narrow majorities in both chambers.

“I’ve been here four years. We know Medicare is going bankrupt. We know Social Security is going bankrupt. I’ve been here for four years. There’s been nothing to make them more viable. Nothing,” he said. “And all we’ve done up here in that four-year period of time is put ourselves in a worse financial position every year.”

Congressional Democrats have joined Biden in using Scott’s 12-point plan to claim the GOP wants to gut Medicare and Social Security in exchange for hiking the debt ceiling. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has vowed that cutting the programs is “off the table” in negotiations with the White House, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has slammed Scott’s plan as a “bad idea.”

That did not stop Biden from goading Republicans into boos and shouts of “Liar!” at his State of the Union address earlier this month when he accused “some Republicans,” an implicit jab at Scott, of wanting to end Medicare and Social Security.

Two days later, Biden followed up his address to Congress with a trip to Scott’s home state, where he called the senator out by name. Scott escalated the tit-for-tat with an ad on Florida airwaves calling on the president to resign.

Since then, Scott has thrown the kitchen sink at Biden to accuse him of hypocrisy. He points to a sunset bill the president himself introduced as a senator in 1975 and argues the money Medicare will save from the Inflation Reduction Act will hurt the pharmaceutical industry’s ability to produce life-saving drugs.

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In the ad, Scott even calls Biden a “tax cheat” for taking advantage of a tax loophole that may have saved him as much as $500,000.

“Don’t tell me he cares about the viability of Medicare when he didn’t even pay his fair share of the taxes,” Scott told the Washington Examiner.