Dropping dramatically in the polls, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Hussein Obama today trotted out an old standby line for struggling left wing pols — the false accusation that, if elected, the Republicans will cut the federal health care program for the aged and poor, Medicare.“Sen. McCain would pay for part of his plan by making drastic cuts in Medicare – $882 billion worth,” Sen. Obama (D-Ill.) told a crowd in Roanoke, Virginia, today. “$882 billion in Medicare cuts to pay for an ill-conceived, badly thought through health care plan that won’t provide more health care to people, even though Medicare is already facing a looming shortfall.”

As Infection Protection & Control’s San Francisco correspondent Peter Menkin reported last month, Medicare has already been reformed during the last few years and the Bush administration is saving costs through new measures, for example, by reducing risk of nosocomial infection for patients whose health coverage is paid for by the program. If patients don’t get sick from an infection from MRSA or C. Difficile when they are in the hospital for another reason, that saves the government money. A spokesman for Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), called Obama’s charge about future spending cuts for Medicare an outright lie.

“Unlike Barack Obama’ risky plan, John McCain’s plans for health care do not punish struggling businesses with fines and taxes, and they certainly do not cut a single benefit for Medicare or Medicaid – Obama is simply lying,” said Tucker Bounds, the spokesman. “It’s absurd for Barack Obama to label John McCain’s plans to trim spending for Medicare and Medicaid as ‘drastic cuts,’ only to then say that his own plans to make cuts will ‘strengthen’ those programs. For Barack Obama to talk about the hope of America and then proceed into misleading and hypocritical accusations only underscores what voters already know: Barack Obama is not who you think he is.”

According to a poll published today by the Associated Press, Obama has sunk drastically in the polls during the last week, since word of his Marxist-style plan to “confiscate the wealth” of Americans was revealed during his encounter with an Ohio plumber, named, Joe, on the campaign trail. AP says Obama leads now by 44-42 over McCain, and, with the error rate for polling taken into account, the race is statistically tied.