Category Archives: Medicare

May 12, 2013 · 6:13 AM

Boehner And McConnell: Our Way Or We Break Medicare

Boehner And McConnell: Our Way Or We Break Medicare

Boehner And McConnell: Our Way Or We Break Medicare

Despicable bullies come to mind when I see how members of Congress will stop at nothing to get their way…

TPM

Your big Obamacare story of the day is that John Boehner and Mitch McConnell won’t recommend commissioners to the Independent Payment Advisory Board — a panel designed to contain Medicare spending — as the law asks them to.

This isn’t a huge surprise given how, er, eager Republicans have been to smooth Obamacare implementation in general. But it’s more revealing, and just as ironic, as their other efforts to break or hinder the law before it takes full effect.

It’s not just that Boehner and McConnell hate Obamacare and it’s not just that they’re hypocrites about spending. What they’re saying with their actions is that if they can’t convert Medicare from a single-payer into a private insurance system, they’d rather the whole thing collapse under its own weight. President Obama’s and Paul Ryan’s Medicare plans both envision budget caps for Medicare — the difference is that Ryan wants to let private insurers enforce it while Obama leaves the task to providers, with IPAB as a backstop. The parties are actually in about the same place fiscally with respect to Medicare, but unless reaching a more sustainable trajectory means privatizing the program, Republicans will try to keep it unsustainable.

Unfortunately for them, the story’s not that simple. The GOP can’t straightforwardly nullify or hobble IPAB by withholding or blocking nominees, the way it can and does with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the National Labor Relations Board. The IPAB can seemingly function with fewer than 15 confirmed members, and even if Senate Republicans filibuster all nominees, the ACA includes a backstop that basically allows the Health and Human Services Secretary to act as a one-woman payment board. So just as states’ rights-loving governors are ceding their sovereignty to the federal government instead of setting up insurance exchanges of their own, Boehner and McConnell are effectively handing power to the executive branch in lieu of doing what the law asks them and maintaining influence over the policy.

Now that may not be a power that the Obama administration wants to exercise. And its not one that’ll necessarily remain in Democratic hands forever. So it’s not a perfect alternative to IPAB. But it’s also not a win-win for Boehner and McConnell. The GOP base might appreciate it, but it’s probably counter to their substantive interests.

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December 10, 2012 · 8:32 AM

It’s immoral to cut Medicare to pay for George Bush’s lies

I couldn’t agree more with John Aravosis of America Blog.

The following article is spot on in it’s condemnation of the Obama administration considering possible Medicare cuts to help pay for the deficit which in fact, was brought on by two unpaid wars and an unpaid prescription program during the George W. Bush administration.

Aravosis correctly attributes George W. Bush’s lies in the lead up to the Iraq war and the subsequent neglect of the Afghanistan initiative, to the approximate 3 trillion dollar cost of both wars which ultimately led to a soaring deficit.  Not to mention the ten year, unpaid for Bush Tax Cuts, all of which got us into this deficit mess in the first place…

America Blog

I cannot believe that Democrats are even considering raising the eligibility age for Medicare as part of the “fiscal cliff” negotiations.

First off, $15bn a year is hardly significant savings, and that’s what you save (at a maximum – some argue it’s significantly less) when you raise the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67: a whopping $15bn a year.

Bush tax cuts and Iraq, Afghanistan are causing the deficitBush tax cuts and Iraq, Afghanistan are causing the deficit.

You know how much George Bush’s little venture in Iraq has been costing us per year? In FY 2011, $46 billion.  That’s three times the savings from cutting Medicare.

And overall, the damn war is going to cost us $3 trillion,  according to Joe Stiglitz. $3 trillion for George Bush’s lie. But let’s cut all of our Medicare coverage for two years in order to pay for the Republican party’s lie of the decade, along with their other lie of the decade, Bush’s tax cuts, that supposedly were going to pay for themselves.

The tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined eat up the lion’s share of the deficit over the coming years.  (See the chart to the right.) So let’s cuts Medicare instead!

Just to be clear, those tax cuts and Bush’s little wars are going to be paid for by cutting your and my Medicare coverage.

Nice.

You don’t see John McCain and Lindsey Graham calling for any hearings on why were lied to about any of those subjects, do you?

Continue reading here…

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September 16, 2012 · 9:38 AM

Challenged on Medicare, G.O.P. Loses Ground

This was a no brainer from the onset.

Whether one is a Democrat, Republican or Independent no senior wants the government changing their Medicare to a voucher system.

Current seniors are allegedly exempt from the changes according to VP nominee, Paul Ryan.  That bit of info does not stop current and future seniors from critiquing the program and actually voting on that issue come Election Day.

The New York Times

Maria Rubin is one of the coveted independent voters in this swing state — so independent that she will not say whether she is voting for President Obama or Mitt Romney. She does share her age (63) and, more quickly, her opinion on Medicare: “I’m not in favor of changing it, or eliminating it.”

Her attitude speaks directly to one of the biggest challenges facing the Republican ticket this year: countering the Democrats’ longstanding advantage as the party more trusted to deal with Medicare.

In the 2010 Congressional races, successful Republicans believed that they had finally found a way to do that, by linking the program’s future to Mr. Obama’s unpopular health insurance overhaul and accusing Democrats of cutting Medicare to pay for it. This summer Mr. Romney resumed the offensive, eventually joined by his running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan.

Initially, polls suggested that the Republican strategy was working. Democrats fretted that Mr. Romney would win the retiree-heavy Florida and increase his support nationwide among older voters, who lean Republican anyway. David Winston, a Republican pollster, wrote a month ago of “a structural shift in the issue” that left the parties in “a dead heat” and Mr. Obama unable to mount an effective response.

But in recent weeks Mr. Obama and his campaign have hit back hard, and enlisted former President Bill Clinton as well, to make the case that the Romney-Ryan approach to Medicare would leave older Americans vulnerable to rising health care costs. Now their counterattack seems to be paying off.

Continue reading here…

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May 26, 2011 · 2:06 AM

Former FL Congressman Alan Grayson: Republicans Show True Colors About Medicare

I heard the audio of Alan Grayson’s appearance on Cenk Uygur’s MSNBC show recently and had to share the video.

Grayson nails it when he talks about the GOP motives in dismantling Medicare.

Here is the video…

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May 25, 2011 · 8:14 PM

Ryan Plan Dies In Senate … But 40 Republicans Voted For It

It’s like Oliver Willis says….we’ve got their names in Congress and in the Senate now. 

In the next two elections, those congressmen and senators who are up for re-election will have to answer for their vote that put millionaire subsidies ahead of people who have paid into Medicare for years and will be denied Medicare as we know it.

Oliver Willis

We know they want to kill Medicare. We’ve just got some names now.

In a tell-tale sign of trouble ahead, there were significantly more defections among GOP moderates than in a similar partisan show vote in March testing support then for an earlier House Republican budget initiative focused on discretionary spending cuts.

Maine Republicans, Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, voted in opposition this time, as did Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown and Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski. And the same Medicare controversy made it impossible to win over any Democratic moderates, despite their unhappiness with the higher spending levels of President Barack Obama’s own budget.

Politico has more…

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May 20, 2011 · 8:17 AM

VIDEO: Town Hall Constituents To Rep. Allen West: ‘Hands Off Medicare!’

UPDATE:  Allen West has recorded a robocall message in support of GOP NY-26 candidate, Jane Corwin.  See text of the message here. 

So we want to know which is it?  In his robocall for Corwin, Allen states that:

Jane will be a fighter on Capitol Hill to preserve Medicare for our future generations… or this:

I will take my hands off Medicare and when there is no Medicare, then I will come see you sir.

Think Progress

Ever since House Republicans proposed and passed their budget plan to effectively end Medicare and extend tax breaks for the wealthy, constituents have been voicing their displeasure at town halls across the country. That trend continued this week at a Pompano Beach, FL town hall held by Tea Party favorite Rep. Allen West (R-FL).

The Florida congressman was asked by a constituent why he, along with nearly all of his Republican colleagues, voted for the Medicare-ending House GOP budget. West sidestepped the question, insisting instead that he doesn’t “think it destroys Medicare.” This earned West a chorus of groans, followed by chants of “hands off Medicare! Hands off Medicare!”:

WEST: I don’t think it destroys Medicare.

[Audience groans]

CONSTITUENTS: Hands off Medicare! Hands off Medicare! Hands off Medicare!

WEST: I will take my hands off Medicare and when there is no Medicare, then I will come see you sir. Next slide.

CONSTITUENTS: Hands off Medicare!

Watch it:

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May 18, 2011 · 12:24 AM

House Republicans Face Backlash At Home Over Medicare Vote

What planet are these  “Tea Baggers” from?

Huffington Post

House Republicans returning to their districts on Monday faced harsh criticism for voting to turn Medicare, the federal health care program for retirees, into a voucher system. GOP lawmakers faced this same constituent iremere weeks ago when they first voted to support House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) budget plan, which would lower tax rates for corporations and the wealthy while replacing Medicare with private-insurance subsidies for those under 55.

Speaking in his home state of Arizona Monday night, freshman Rep. Ben Quayle (R), son of former vice president Dan Quayle, took heat from constituents who demanded to know why he supported turning Medicare over to private insurers.

Quayle isn’t the only lawmaker who, after voting in favor of Ryan’s plan, faced anger at home this week. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.) faced a similarly boisterous crowd at her first Vancouver town hall, while Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) weathered disapproving audiences in Worcester County.

A town hall meeting held by freshman Allen West (R-Fla.) on Monday night degenerated into a shouting match, with one person having to be removed from the meeting by police.

A recent speech by Ryan, meanwhile, was met with dozens of protesters marching outside a hotel in downtown Chicago and carrying signs that read: “Hands off my Medicare” and “Paul Ryan plan: Let them eat cat food.”

The most recent round of backlash comes just days after former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican presidential candidate, called the Republican plan to end Medicare too “radical” and “too big a jump” for Americans. He also referred to it as “right-wing social engineering.”

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May 15, 2011 · 1:58 AM

McConnell Demands Dems’ Help “Stick It to Seniors”

Perrspectives

On Friday, Medicare’s board of trustees announced that the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010 has added eight years of solvency to the health care program serving 46 million American seniors. That news capped a week of political irony involving Medicare. After freshmen House Republicans complained to President Obama about the backlash over their vote to kill the guaranteed insurance program, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell demanded Democrats join the GOP in passing draconian Medicare reduction as a condition of raising the U.S. debt ceiling. Of course, in the run up to the 2010 midterm elections, McConnell attacked Democrats for “sticking it to seniors with cuts to Medicare.”

Despite having voted seven times to raise the debt ceiling under George W. Bush, Mitch McConnell for weeks has been moving the goalposts for President Obama. In March, he added a vote on a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution, insisting “not a single one of the 47 Republicans will vote to raise the debt ceiling unless it includes with it some credible effort to do something about our debt.” McConnell then upped the ante:

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell warned on Friday that GOP senators will not vote to increase the government’s borrowing limit unless President Barack Obama agrees to rein in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, laying down a high-stakes marker just weeks before the debt ceiling is reached.

This week, McConnell added several new conditions for boosting the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling and averting a global economic calamity. As the New York Times reported:

Mr. McConnell said that he would look for an agreement to reduce spending on discretionary federal programs in the 2012 and 2013 fiscal years and to put caps on spending for 2014 and beyond.“There will be no tax increases in connection with raising the debt ceiling,” he added. 

On top of it all, Senator McConnell demanded political air cover from President Obama and Congressional Democrats:

“If there is a grand bargain of some kind with the president of the United States, none of it will be usable for either side in next year’s election — none of it. We can do something important for the country together, and this is the opportunity.”

If that sounds more than a little hypocritical coming from Mitch McConnell, it should.

McConnell played a central role in the wildly successful Republican effort to scare the bejesus out of America’s seniors over mythical Medicare benefits cuts. As it turns out, the GOP didn’t merely oppose Medicare its inception; McConnell was a key player in the GOP crusade to gut the program by 15% in the 1990′s. In the summer of 2009, McConnell repeatedly turned to rapid-fire lies beginning about Obama’s Medicare funding plans to machine gun health care reform:

“Some in Congress seem to be in such a rush to pass just any reform, rather than the right reform, that they’re looking everywhere for the money to pay for it — even if it means sticking it to seniors with cuts to Medicare.”

That salvo came just weeks after McConnell promised to defeat health care reform in the Senate, warning America’s highest turnout voting block:

“They are going to pay for this plan by cutting Medicare, that is cutting seniors.”

McConnell’s fear-mongering hardly ended there. He repeatedly warned that the Affordable Care Act would “deny, delay, or ration care.” After insisting to NBC’s David Gregory that 47 million uninsured in America “don’t go without health care,” Mitch McConnell darkly warned that a public option “may cost you your life.”

But now that the GOP desire to gut Medicare may cost many Congressional Republicans their political lives, Mitch McConnell wants Democrats to protect them.

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April 6, 2011 · 4:58 PM

GOP To Propose Obamacare For Seniors

Forbes

Despite the Republican propensity to compare the Affordable Care Act to something akin to the antichrist, word is that GOP budget leader, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), will propose a dramatic change in the Medicare program that will closely mirror the key features of Obamacare – only for seniors.

The proposal would do away with (for everyone presently under 55 years of age) the current single payer government system for senior medical care and replace it with a program whereby seniors would choose private health insurance coverage from a menu of approved private health insurers. The government would subsidize the program by giving seniors a voucher to be used in purchasing coverage, the amount of such payment to be defined according to need.

Does any of this sound familiar?

While the terminology may be different, it seems particularly reasonable to assume that the word “menu” is code for “health care exchange”.  And while the word “voucher” plays well with the GOP base, it is really no different from the subsidies the ACA will pay to those under 65 who purchase health insurance.

Unfortunately, while Ryan has emulated a number of features from the ACA, he’s forgotten to make the adjustments the law makes to actually ensure that health care is more accessible to beneficiaries rather than more profitable to health insurance companies.

Making private insurance work for the younger demographics is far easier than trying to make it work for the elderly due to the most basic tenet of health insurance – the insurance pool must be balanced by having 80 healthy people in the pool to pay for every 20 who are ill.

Given that most Americans 65 and older are a walking pre-existing medical condition, it is difficult to imagine how functioning insurance pools can be constructed from a universe filled with these people. It is equally hard to see how health insurers could offer such a plan without severely restricting the benefits offered or, in the alternative, charging very large premiums – unless the government is prepared to put large enough subsidy checks in the pockets of the insurers to cover the extra costs.

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November 11, 2010 · 1:07 AM

Debt Commission Report Targets Social Security, Medicare

So, although Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann’s accusation of “death panels” under health care reform were lies, it seems that something similar may be in the works via the states cutting Medicaid or the Debt commission suggestion of cutting Social Security and Medicare…

Huffington Post

Today’s upcoming report by the White House’s fiscal commission is expected to include recommendations to raise the retirement age for Social Security and cut Medicare benefits — two policy prescriptions that will be met with deep opposition from Democrats and some Republicans — according to a source who has been briefed on the proposal.

The chairmen of the commission will unveil their overarching recommendations for debt and deficit reduction on Wednesday afternoon, weeks before the official unveiling is expected.

The findings are not the final report of the commission, officially known as the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. Rather they are the specific suggestions of its two chairs, former Sen. Alan Simpson and former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles. The ultimate findings will require the support of 14 members of the 18-member commission. And at this juncture it is unclear if the votes are there, sources familiar with deliberation say.

In the process of pursuing their reforms for Social Security and Medicare, the commission chairs are expected to suggest that the end result will be a 70 percent cut in benefits and 30 percent increase in revenues, according to the source familiar with the upcoming announcement.

“What a crazy proposal, what a crazy proposal,” said a Democratic source briefed on the findings. “I expect that the White House is going to distance itself big-time from this, saying this is just the chairman not the commission.”   Continue reading…

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