2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forum"Mitt Romney's Astoundingly Cynical Medicare Strategy" Jonathan Cohn at the New Republic
Mitt Romney's Astoundingly Cynical Medicare StrategyJonathan Cohn at the New Republic
http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/106061/romney-ryan-medicare-cut-obamacare-priebus
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Yes, the Affordable Care Act includes substantial cuts to Medicare. But Ryan's own budget, which nearly every House Republican voted to pass and which Romney has said he would sign as president, leaves those cuts in place and uses them to finance other priorities. In other words, the Romney campaign is attacking a proposal that Romney and his allies endorse.
The most significant difference between the two sides, at least for the short- to medium-term, is how they handle the savings these cuts generate. Obamacare puts the money back into the pockets of people who need help with their medical bills. A portion of the money is earmarked for children and non-elderly Americans, who, starting in 2014, will become eligible for Medicaid or receive tax credits to offset the cost of private insurance. A smaller, but still significant, portion of the money is for seniors. It helps them pay for prescription drugs, by filling the "donut hole" in Medicare Par D coverage. It also eliminates out-of-pocket costs for annual wellness visits, some cancer screenings, and other preventative services. Those benefits have actually started already: In the first six months of this year, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, more than 16 million seniors took advantage of the free preventative care provision.
Ryan's budgetwhich, again, Romney has repeatedly embraced and said he would signactually takes those new benefits away. The Part D donut hole would open back up. Access to free preventative care would vanish. And where would Ryan and Romney put the money instead? They say it's for deficit reduction. I'd say it's really for their big new tax cuts, which disproportionately benefit the wealthy. If somebody is "stealing" from seniors here, it's not Obama.
The two sides have each proposed additional changes to Medicare, the most significant of which would start to take effect a decade from now. They represent very different approaches to health care policy and are worthy of a serious, honest debate. But it's hard to have that kind of discussion when one side cares so little about presenting the facts accurately.
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TomCADem
(17,378 posts)...Republicans will repeatedly lie and the corporate media either repeats their lies or gives them a free pass.
MidwestTransplant
(8,015 posts)cuts to benefits are. This is about cost savings.
ProgressiveEconomist
(5,818 posts)unlimited healthcare services for seniors.
The biggest difference between Republican and Democratic Medicare reform goals is in the proposed mix of these two elements.
George W. Bush added "Medicare Advantage" as an almost pure form of corporate welfare. President Obama's ACA pares back Medicare Advantage's overpayments to corporate providers for the same guaranteed benefits to seniors that now cost $700 billion less under traditional Medicare (see http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021120658 for snippets from a Republican health finance expert's Bloomberg interview on this point).
But Paul Ryan's "Roadmap for the Future" simply terminates the unlimited healthcare services for seniors and keeps just the corporate welfare element of Medicare. Under Ryan's plan, corporate providers would get from the Federal government a certain amount of money for each senior. But seniors would have no guarantee of unlimited coverage for actual healthcare services. This is a crucial point that NEVER gets covered in big media, even on a Meet the Press roundtable with Rachel Maddow yesterday.