The Affordable Care Act breaks “the Medicare promise”
September 14, 2012 at 2:39 pm in News, ObamaCare by Dustin Siggins 6 Comments
In a recent campaign ad, the Obama campaign claims Mitt Romney would “break [the] promise” of Medicare. The ad, seen below, cites myriad sources to back the claim.
Unfortunately, the ad never addresses the significant flaws in the President’s own health care law. Tea Party Patriots have spent the last two-and-a-half years working to overturn the law, but let’s look at some of its key components again:
1. Defenders of the Affordable Care Act claim its $716 billion cut in future Medicare spending isn’t a cut because the program’s budget still grows, just less quickly than it did before the Act became law. They use two arguments for this stance – first, that a cut in future spending isn’t a cut. Second, they note the cut is to providers, not patients.
Regarding the first claim, these defenders are being intellectually dishonest. Unlike most other federal programs, Medicare is governed by permanent laws that set spending based upon factors such as the number of people in the program and the cost of medical care. Unlike almost every other federal program, its budget is not approved by Congress. Thus, any cut to future spending is indeed a cut, not a spending reduction compared to future expectations.
Regarding where the cut hits, this too is a fallacious defense – while the cuts won’t hit patients directly, hitting providers means patients will suffer reduced access to care and other problems.
In short, the Affordable Care Act indeed cuts $716 billion from Medicare, and it will cause a great deal of harm to Medicare patients.
2. In order to reach a “deficit reduction” level of $109 billion in the newest Congressional Budget Office analysis of the law, the Affordable Care Act had to raise approximately $770 billion in taxes. To quote Charles Krauthammer:
Suppose someone – say, the president of United States – proposed the following: We are drowning in debt. More than $14 trillion right now. I’ve got a great idea for deficit reduction. It will yield a savings of $230 billion over the next 10 years: We increase spending by $540 billion while we increase taxes by $770 billion.
He’d be laughed out of town.
3. The law violates the First Amendment via the HHS Mandate, which forces religiously-affiliated institutions such as schools, adoption centers, and hospitals to provide insurance that covers (for “free”) sterilization, contraception and abortifacients…even if such coverage violates the principles of the organization.
4. As I noted shortly after the Supreme Court found the individual insurance mandate constitutional, the Affordable Care Act allows the government to violate the “free will” tradition Americans have always enjoyed under the Constitution.
5. And the most laughable part of the law, in relation to the ad? Under the Affordable Care Act, Medicare’s Trust Fund will still go bankrupt in 2024, which strikes me as a clear violation of “the Medicare promise.”
Unlike Social Security, Medicare is a complicated system of public-private partnerships that has a long history of fraud, waste, and other inefficiencies. Most efforts to prevent its oncoming bankruptcy are rooted in theory, which allows the ad to make its claims. However, claiming that a premium-support plan will destroy “the Medicare promise” while campaigning on a law that will literally destroy this same promise is intellectually dishonest, to say the least.
If on average 55% of the people polled want this horrible bill repealed and 62% of people say we’re on the wrong track, why are the presidential polls showing Obama winning. I can’t figure this out, but am very concerned that this bill will be here to stay if people don’t start waking up. It’s pretty simple; If Obama wins reelection, the bill stays. If he loses we have a chance to overturn this and put some common sense policies in place.
As conservative’s, one of our fundamental core values, is the Christian Faith. Jesus teaches us in the bible to be our brother’s keeper and lived his teaching by healing the sick and crippled poor, free of charge. Obama care may not be perfect (name a bill of this magnitude that ever was when it was first created) and will most surely be reformed to make it as efficient and beneficial as possible, but America needed to get the ball rolling on a solution to the health care crisis in our country and Obama stepped up to the plate and did it. Martin Luther king once said, “You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step” and Obama has done just that.
One of conservative’s core values is the Christian Faith. Jesus teaches us in the bible to be our brother’s keeper and he went through his life healing the sick and crippled, free of charge. Obama care may not be perfect (name a bill of this magnitude that ever was when it was first created) and will surely be reformed to make it as efficient and beneficial as possible. America needed to get the ball rolling on a solution to the health care crisis in our country and Obama stepped up to the plate and did it. In the words of Martin Luther King, “you don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step” and Obama has done just that.
I believe a “fair”– and, not even “inspired”– reading of Jesus’s words and deeds, would answer the question put to Jesus: “Who is my Brother’s Keeper?” would elicit the response that you and I are our brother’s keeper. There are many, many things wrong if being my brother’s keeper is acomplished by Comrade Civil Government mandating what one’s “fair share” will cost, and then mandating what one’s “fair share” will get. A cursory review ofthe entire history of Civil Governments’ program performance with reference to effectiveness, efficiency and compassion puts this issue in perspective. More about the unfunded mandates lurking at sunrise tomorrow to collapse our economy later…
Absolute bullshit. The entire thing needs to be repealed. Obama TAX was a DEMOCRAT attempt at a hostile “takeover” of healthcare by the Federal Government. The entire thing was “passed” under the table with kickbacks and bribes using TAXPAYER money, it was worked out in the DARK, by crooked politicians and ILLEGAL backroom “deals”. It jsut needs burned to the last page.
I may well BE my “brother’s” keeper, but I am not, and will not BE finacially broken by a dictatorial edict from a “party” that is simply the most foul criminals to ever sit the halls of Congress. NASTY Pelosi finished the event AS criminal, in plying the “we have to pass it so we can know what’s in it”. In the SAME manner, I have a DRINK for that botox-befuddled vampire hag, but she has to drink it, to find out what was IN it. This is NOT acceptable, nor tolerable, nor RIGHT, nor GOOD. It is NOT We, (“pelosi, reid and obama”) the THREEPLE”, it is “We, the PEOPLE” and it WILL come down with the dethroning of the Obama.
Romney has promised to begin the repeal on day ONE of his Presidency, and I will SEE THAT ACCOMPLISHED.
One could argue that a conservative core value is to be pragmatic as a society. Without that core value nothing else matters. This country up until recently has always had the resources to take care of the truly helpless, but those days are slipping away because now we have decided that helping the truly clueless “free of charge” is the moral thing to do. I have listened to doctors, other CPA,s employees, business owners, the Medicare actuary, and senior citizens. The consensus is overwhelming. Not all these people can be wrong. We should have gone with some incremental “common sense” policies.That would have been the right thing to do, and we just didn’t do it.