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August 12, 2012
Did Obama Steal From Medicare?
Republicans have taken to defending their approach to “Medicare reform” by arguing that, after all, Obama simply “stole” 700 Billion from Medicare to fund Obamacare. It’s a deceptive argument, at best--an attempt to distract by shuting "so's your old man." But it's also wrong. Here’s the Washington Post’s fact check explanation as to why that assertion is essentially misleading—their reference is to the claim as it was advanced by Michelle Bachman during the Republican primaries (but the facts haven’t changed since then) . The money paragraphs follow, but read the whole thing :
First of all, under the health care bill, Medicare spending continues to go up year after year. The health care bill tries to identify ways to save money, and so the $500 billion figure comes from the difference over 10 years between anticipated Medicare spending (what is known as “the baseline”) and the changes the law makes to reduce spending. (Look at slide 15 of this nifty tutorial on the law’s impact on Medicare by the Kaiser Family Foundation to see a chart of the year by year savings.)The savings actually are wrung from health-care providers, not Medicare beneficiaries. These spending reductions presumably would be a good thing, since virtually everyone agrees that Medicare spending is out of control. In the House Republican budget, lawmakers repealed the Obama health care law but retained all but $10 billion of the nearly $500 billion in Medicare savings, suggesting the actual policies enacted to achieve these spending reductions were not that objectionable to GOP lawmakers.
Posted by stevemack at August 12, 2012 04:48 PM
