California Conservative

Much has been made about President Obama’s townhall meeting in Portsmouth, NH yesterday. This article in Politico contains a quote from President Obama at the townhall that needs scrutinizing. Here’s President Obama’s quote:

At his Tuesday town hall event in New Hampshire, President Barack Obama made a point to reach out to seniors, noting the low support in polls for his health care proposals. “We are not talking about cutting Medicare benefits,” Obama said, trying to assuage the audience.

But Obama is talking about finding hundreds of billions in savings from Medicare, cuts supporters say will trim fat from the program, including slashing $156 billion in subsidies to Medicare Advantage, a privately administered Medicare program.

As Ed points out in this post, there’s a method to President Obama’s apparent insanity:

In fact, Medicare Advantage is a Godsend for those trapped within the Medicare system. Recipients pay substantial monthly premiums, but the plan allows for better provider payments, which keep providers from locking patients out of their clinics. The extended insurance provides coverage for services which Medicare ignores, and some create a co-payment system rather than the 60/40 system Medicare gives seniors and the disabled in practice.

How do I know this? The First Mate has Medicare Advantage, and we saw what Medicare did before we got the supplemental coverage. It’s a disaster for anyone needing anything more than just maintenance care.

Anyone who’s followed Ed’s blogging knows that Ed’s beloved First Mate had to deal with one major health crisis after another. Many is the time Ed’s asked for prayer for the First Mate’s health. In short, Ed’s got instant, and total, credibility with me. But I digress.

President Obama says that he isn’t talking about cutting Medicare. I actually agree with him. In fact, I’d argue that the last thing he wanted to talk about was cutting Medicare. I’d argue that he wanted to avoid talking about his proposed cuts because he knows seniors don’t like his proposal:

Under pressure to pay for his ambitious reshaping of the nation’s healthcare system, President Obama today will outline $313 billion in Medicare and Medicaid spending cuts over the next decade to help cover the cost of expanding coverage to tens of millions of America’s uninsured. The proposal comes on top of more than $634 billion in new revenue Obama suggested reserving for healthcare in his February budget plan.

President Obama still hasn’t told us how he’d cut Medicare funding by $300,000,000,000, a 10 percent cut, while Medicare enrollment is increasing by 30 percent at the same time. That’s before telling us how understaffed nursing staffs and overworked doctors will deal with 46,000,000 new patients.

That’s before President Obama admits the fact that his Medicare cuts are cuts in government expenditures, not cost-savings gleaned from a more efficient system that then get passed along to Medicare’s customers, namely senior citizen John Q. Public types.

Among the proposed policy changes outlined by the president are:

• Reductions in payments to providers to reflect increased efficiencies in the system, which the White House estimates could save $110 billion over the next decade.
• Cuts in federal subsidies to hospitals that treat large populations of uninsured patients, estimated to save $106 billion over the next decade.Cuts in how much the federal government pays pharmaceutical companies to provide prescription drugs to seniors and others, estimated to save $75 billion over the next decade.

The president described the proposals as “common sense changes” that could make the system more efficient.

Hospitals are already getting shortchanged by Medicare. That’s a big driver in the hospitals’ cost-shifting.

Technorati Tags: Medicare, Health Care, Cost-Shifting, Budget Cuts, President Obama, Townhall Meeting, Portsmouth, Senior Citizens, Medicare Advantage, Seniors

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 1:16 pm and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Health Care, Obama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.