At the moment, the hot issue of the 2012 presidential campaign is Medicare, with the Obama and Romney campaigns trading charges and counter-charges over the health-insurance program for the elderly. Since we at the Prospect love clarifying the muddy and making the complex understandable, we thought we'd unpack the arguments the two sides are making and provide some context so we can all grasp this a bit better. We'll start with the campaigns' claims.

Does Mitt Romney actually want to "end Medicare as we know it"?

That's the charge Democrats are now making; here's a video the Obama campaign just released:

If you don't think Republicans are monomaniacs, may I suggest watching Mitch McConnell's performance on Fox News Sunday. Three times host Chris Wallace asked McConnell what would become of the 30 million Americans who'd be able to obtain health coverage under the Obama administration's newly upheld health-care law if the Republicans repealed the law, and three times McConnell said that such temporal concerns were beside the point. The third time Wallace asked about the 30 million Americans, McConnell responded, "That is not the issue.

For supporters of the Affordable Care Act, it was hard to hear—over the cheering—anything besides the fact that the Supreme Court today kept the law almost entirely intact. But the Court did make a slight change to a crucial part of the ACA: Medicaid expansion. Under the law, by 2014, states are supposed to extend their Medicaid programs to cover people under 65 with incomes up to 133 percent of the federal poverty line. An analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that means 17 million more people would have access to health care over the next 10 years.  Before today, it looked like states didn't have much choice in the matter.

People like me often complain about "he said/she said" reporting, which treats all claims by competing political actors as having equal validity, and doesn't bother to determine whether one side or the other might not be telling the truth. There are lots of reasons why that kind of reporting is harmful, but it's important to understand that it doesn't just keep people soaking in a lukewarm bath of ignorance, it can actively misinform them, leading them to believe things that are false.

Today's New York Times has a textbook example of what happens when political reporters can do when they refuse to adjudicate a factual dispute between candidates. In the story, Michael Barbaro doesn't just allow Mitt Romney to deceive, he actively abets that deception in the way he constructs his narrative. Here's the key excerpt:

While it’s hard to make a bad advertisement with Clint Eastwood, this would be good even without “The Man With No Name.” The basic message is straightforward— it’s “halftime in America.” Yes, the country suffered a major setback four years ago, but we have the strength and reserve to press forward on the current path and succeed.

As I've mentioned before, the centerpiece of Paul Ryan's budget plan is its "reforms" for Medicare and Medicaid. To quickly summarize, the Ryan plan would eliminate Medicare as a single-payer health care program, and replace it with a series of means-tested vouchers that seniors would use to purchase health care on the private insurance market (in structure, it's similar to the Affordable Care Act). For Medicaid -- which mostly provides health insurance for poor children and long-term care for seniors -- Ryan would eliminate federal guidelines for the program in favor of no-strings-attached block grants to states.

More and more doctors are dropping Medicaid; more and more patients are unable to continue to see their doctors. The cuts come as states anticipate losing federal aid and try to close budget gaps, reports The New York Times. These kind of low-reimbursement rates are what many fear with a single-payer system. And, to some extent, critics are right that the government would regulate rates. But, of course, it's entirely different to have an insurance system that only provides for the neediest and a system that collects premium contributions from and pays for everyone.