Dot citizens join Kerry in decrying GOP’s budget moves

Ingrid Houlder Baptiste, a Fields Corner personal care attendant, was nervous as she took the podium. The 47-year-old referred to U.S. Sen. John Kerry, standing a few feet away, as his Republican colleague, “Sen. Scott Brown,” and started to sob halfway through her remarks as she decried a Republican budget proposal revamping Medicare for those under 55 years of age. She said the budget proposal, with proposed cuts to Medicaid, would have an adverse effect on her job and her patients.

Kerry blasted the proposal, put forward by U.S. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, saying it slashes billions out of Medicare while replacing it with a voucher system, and cuts higher education grants for students. The budget also includes permanent tax cuts for earners in the $500,000-plus income bracket, he said.

“The Ryan budget is not a budget that’s a pathway to prosperity,” Kerry (D-Boston) said Monday morning in front of a crowd of seniors at the Kit Clark Senior Services building in Fields Corner. “It’s a roadmap for poverty in this country.”

The Senate voted 57 to 40 on Wednesday to reject the budget plan. It was expected to fail while putting the upper chamber’s Republican members in the uncomfortable position of voting on an unpopular plan proposed by their House counterparts.

Turning to Houlder Baptiste, Kerry said, “I don’t blame you for having Sen. Brown on your mind.” Hours before the press conference in Fields Corner got underway, Brown wrote that he would vote to oppose the budget proposal in a column published on the Washington-based website POLITICO.

“Protecting those who have been counting on the current system their entire adult lives should be the key principle of reform,” Brown wrote. “Second, Medicare has already taken significant cuts to help pay for Obama’s health care plan.”

Flossie Webb, a Mattapan resident and secretary of the Boston chapter of the Massachusetts Senior Action Council, she was “relieved Brown has changed his position.” (Not that it inclines her to vote for him when he is up for reelection next year: “No, I didn’t vote for him in the first place,” she said.).

“It would increase co-pays and pension plan costs,” said Webb, 81, of the Ryan budget plan.

Brown had said he would vote for the Ryan budget, despite expecting it would fail, in front of a chamber of commerce earlier in May. But his staffers reportedly said he did not mean to endorse the plan. “I plan on continuing to work with people of goodwill -- in either party -- to solve the very real problems we face. Our country is on an unsustainable fiscal path,” Brown wrote in his op-ed piece. “But I do not think it requires us to change Medicare as we know it. We can work inside of Medicare to make it more solvent.”

Asked about Brown’s column, Kerry said he had not yet read it, adding, “I don’t comment on my colleagues’ votes or what’s happening. You guys will have to interpret that for yourselves.”

Brown has spent the last several weeks awkwardly ricocheting from one firestorm to another – over pollution regulations, fake photos of a dead Osama bin Laden that Brown initially thought were real, and even a handshake with Democratic rival Setti Warren – as Democrats have hungrily revved up efforts to take back his seat in a year when a Democratic president is at the top of the ballot in deep blue Massachusetts.

Even so, a top Democrat said Brown remains hard to beat. Pointing to Brown’s popularity and healthy campaign account, Mayor Thomas Menino said on WCVB-TV, “You know, I get criticized by my colleagues in the Democratic Party because I’m honest about it. I just say it’s very difficult right now to think about who can beat him.”

“So it sounds like you’re saying no, that they don’t have a candidate right now,” a reporter cut in. “Right now, right now. I don’t think we have a candidate right now who can do it,” Menino said.

Material from State House News Service was used in this report.


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