Mitt should stay on the offensive on Medicare:
The Obama cuts also rely on grinding, year-after-year reductions in payments to doctors and other providers. This is a way to maintain that there are technically no changes in “benefits,” though access to and quality of care inevitably will be affected.
No one concerned with the health of Medicare would go about it in this fashion. But “Obamacare” was helter-skelter legislating, a desperate attempt to make the numbers temporarily add up.
Medicare’s actuaries consistently sound the alarm about the consequences. A May 2012 report by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said, “The large reductions in Medicare payments rates to physicians would likely have serious implications for beneficiary access to care.”
It also noted the punishing effect on hospitals, nursing facilities and home-health agencies, which “would have to withdraw from providing services to Medicare beneficiaries, merge with other provider groups or shift substantial portions of Medicare costs to their non-Medicare, non-Medicaid payers.”
Oh, is that all? If a Republican president had done this, The New York Times would have called for impeachment proceedings.
Is the Republicans’ counter-assault on Medicare hypocritical? No. How — not whether — to restrain Medicare is the question. The Democratic approach, now and in the future, is blunt-force price controls. Republicans want to get savings through competition and choice.
Leftists hate competition and choice. It doesn’t give them enough power over our lives.
Insurance is insurance. It’s basically a very simple proposition. Medicare is not insurance. It’s something completely different.
Can the poor afford health insurance in a free market? If not, should the government step in to redistribute wealth so that they can?
I don’t see any other relevant questions (well, there are subsidiary questions once those first two are answered.)
Politicians blow right passed those questions with the assumption that they have to do something. The only something the government can do is screw things up.
I pay a bit over a hundred dollars a month for medicare. The doctors bill me a lot more than they did when I had no insurance. Everybody is gaming the system. That’s what government influence does. It hides all the numbers so nobody really knows what’s what.
We need to simplify things which means voting most of these numb nuts out of office.
Very little of what people call “health insurance” is insurance. I’d be interested to know when the standard private-sector health “insurance” companies began offering all the non-insurance coverages people now take for granted — I’m betting it happened after the Medicare Act.
If anyone needed a clue that HMO plans (or anything resembling them) were not actual insurance, they could just remember what HMO stood for.
(hint, it’s number 2)
Premium supports cause competition. Price controls cause shortages.
It’ll fit on a bumper sticker…
You need a longer bumper sticker to explain why premium support is a good thing for seniors (Medicare vouchers), but a terrible thing for adults under 65 (Obamacare subsidies).
One is primarily redistributionary, the other is savings.
I’d go on, but you can’t teach a cricket what “savings” means.
Ronald Reagan famously campaigned against Medicare with an LP record, concluding his argument with the prediction that if Medicare passed he and his listeners would “spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.”
Now, 47 years later, Mitt Romney is trying to convince the voters that the Reagan-worshipping GOP is the true champion of Medicare. It’s Obamacare, now, that heralds the death of freedom.
No doubt in another 45 years the GOP will be campaigning as the party committed to strengthening and preserving Obamacare.
No, this is not the Reagan-worshipping GOP. Just as the old Vulcan proverb, “it took Nixon to go to China”, it took Reagan to engage in the most vigorous Keynesian stimulus in our history and to raise the payroll tax to save Social Security.
I don’t know what to call today’s GOP, but Jon Hunstman used the words “setting one’s hair on fire.” Today’s GOP simply won’t give Mr. Romney any room for maneuver. It is as if Lincoln forbade Sherman from his Georgia campaign and insisted that all resources be devoted to a frontal assault on Richmond.
The thing is from a tactical standpoint, to win Florida is to win the election, the Affordable Care Act indeed raids Medicare, perhaps it raids Medicare because Republicans offered no “political cover” to raise taxes to pay for Affordable Health Care, so Romney could barnstorm Florida calling out “Medicare, Medicare, Medicare” and become President. It would be completely cynical, but Jim, so are the Democrats and every other political faction, but there would be a mild degree of irony in the Democrats being at the receiving end of Mediscare.
As it is, Mr. Romney had to select Mr. Ryan to prevent a revolt among the troops as it were, and Mr. Ryan is publically identified with a Plan, to say that plan raids Medicare say you on the Right is demagoguery as says the Left about the criticism that the Affordable Health care act.
Will we in the Libertarian/Conservative/Right blogosphere give Mr. Romney room for maneuver? No! I learned from my “Conservative Leadership” indoctrination of my youth that the Left has this thing called the dialectic, that the leaders on the Left know who they all are and give their guys room for maneuver, Lenin’s New Economic Plan, Chairman Deng’s New China. And then there was Bill Clinton, according the Am Spec’s Emmett Tyrrell, as Left as they come, but the DLC and Welfare Reform were The Dialectic. But I guess our side has our leaders on a short leash.
All I know as y’all regard giving Mr. Romney room for maneuver is more “kicking the can down the road” and more evidence that “sooner or later you run out of other people’s money”, and and when that happens, “people call that simple bad luck”, and yes, a jury would indeed embrace Gary Cooper’s call the jury nullification in The Fountainhead.
So General Sherman’s boys are told to do no more burning of Atlanta and pillaging of the Georgia countryside, are being ordered to board trains, and a plan is made for the big push on Richmond. I mean, we need to win this war NOW instead of shilly-shallying around.