In their pretense of creating a government health care system that will cost less than $900 billion over the next 10 years, the Democrats plan to cut Medicare spending by $400 to $500 billion. This is worrying senior citizens who are now on Medicare.
About 20% of them are participating in Medicare Advantage, which is a supplementary program subsidized by the government and administered by private insurers. The senior pays a premium and it pays for additional medical benefits, including dental and vision care. The Senate plans to cut the subsidy by $123 billion over the next 10 years, which would reduce the subsidy by about half.
The Senate bill is also planning to reduce payments to hospitals, nursing homes, hospice care, and home care by about $211 billion. The remaining cuts are supposed to come as a result of eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse.
Rasmussen reported that 46% of senior citizens are strongly opposed to ObamaCare. Only 33% favor it at all. This is strong opposition compared to that of the rest of the population. Oddly, the rest of the population will one day be seniors and will supposedly be given the same depleted services, but they simply are not paying attention to the issues as the seniors are. The seniors vote in larger percentages than the rest of the population too, especially in off-presidential elections.
I am not endorsing Medicare. It is an unconstitutional program which catastrophically transfers wealth from the poorer young to the richer elderly. It is also a Ponzi scheme, which is going to collapse. With more people about to be put on Medicaid by the current so-called health reform bills and the sorry state of the economy and its expected slow recovery, the Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid programs will have to undergo cut-backs in services and payments. Increased energy costs and medical expenses due to Democrat bils will permanently retard the growth of the economy. The present seniors hoped to make it to the end of their lives before that collapse occurs, but the collapse is looming much closer now.
I, however, am actually in favor of cut-backs now, rather than later, but this only makes sense in the context of a general cut-back in government expenditures. It makes no sense if the cut-back is simply so the government can spend the money on other unconstitutional programs that will overall enlarge the government sector at the expense of the private sector. The expanded government role in health care due to ObamaCare will cost much more in government expenditures than the $829 billion over 10 years of the CBO estimate of the incomplete mark-up version of the Baucus Senate bill. It will also cost the American people much more in the mandated insurance premiums, which will increase at faster rates than those which caused many people to call for reform in the first place. In other words, the cut-backs on Medicare proposed are not going to prevent the collapse of entitlements at all. They are going to actually speed up the collapse.
Senator Bill Nelson (D, FL) wants to stop the cuts in Medicare Advantage for those already enrolled. He will not allow new enrollments, however. This is pure politics. Seniors who paid relatively little for this subsidized program will sponge off young people who will never have a similar program available to them when they are seniors. There is no principle here, just a further transfer of wealth from the young to the old. Just another case of theft, though maybe with the advantage that one day there will be no such program. The theft will then at least have a time limit, for that program. Meanwhile, the fertile brains of politicians will create many another subsidy program to buy some constituency's votes.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment