Is it fair to cast eliminating waste and fraud to save billions in taxpayer funds as “cuts” to Medicare?
– Forbes.com
Obviously, it is not. But that’s exactly how Republicans have been spinning provisions in the Affordable Health Care Act — which they call Obamacare — that enable rooting out inefficiencies and corruption in the Medicare system. They also used this vile disinformation as campaign spin in order to scare millions of seniors into voting for them in the midterms.
But that was four weeks ago. Now the New York Times has spoken with Rep. Darrell Issa, the wealthy former car thief from California who is set to become the House’s chief Obama administration inquisitor — officially known as the chairman of the Oversight Committee — about his plans for next year. And guess what? He says he plans to ferret out “$40 billion a year in fraud or waste in Medicare” over the next two years.
But hold on here. After voting in lockstep against Democrats’ plan to eliminate waste and fraud and then campaigning against the efficiencies as “cuts” to Medicare, now Republicans are simply adopting the Democrats’ idea and moving on?
You betcha.
First, let’s look back at some examples of the GOP disinformation on the new law’s provisions for rooting out inefficiencies in Medicare. Here’s a typical example from the GOP’s Fox channel website:
Obamacare slices $528-billion from Medicare, including $136-billion carved out of Medicare Advantage. As The Washington Examiner’s Susan Ferrechio has reported, “The Medicare Advantage cuts will force 4.8 million seniors off the popular plan by 2019. An additional $23 billion in cuts to Medicare will come from a panel charged with slashing Medicare spending.”
Those are just some of the gut-wrenching questions about Obamacare that cry out for answers.
Here’s an excerpt from a hit piece from Fox commentator and professional Clinton hater Dick Morris and his wife, trying to raise money from seniors by scaring them to death:
If [the “cuts”] take effect, physicians’ fees will be slashed 21 percent and hospital reimbursements for Medicare patients will be cut by $1.3 billion. Tens of thousands of doctors and thousands of healthcare institutions — hospitals, hospices, outpatient clinics and such — will refuse to treat Medicare patients.
And here’s an oped from the GOP-controlled Wall St. Journal from September that attempts to prop up the lie being promulgated by Republican candidates in the midterms that the new law’s provisions to end waste and fraud are “cuts”:
Altogether, ObamaCare cuts $818 billion from Medicare Part A (hospital insurance) from 2014-2023, the first 10 years of its full implementation, and $3.2 trillion over the first 20 years, 2014-2033. Adding in ObamaCare cuts for Medicare Part B (physicians fees and other services) brings the total cut to $1.05 trillion over the first 10 years and $4.95 trillion over the first 20 years.
These draconian cuts in Medicare payments to doctors, hospitals and other health-care providers that serve America’s seniors were the basis for the Congressional Budget Office’s official “score” — repeatedly cited by the president—that the health-reform legislation would actually reduce the federal deficit. But Mr. Obama never disclosed how that deficit reduction would actually be achieved.
There will be additional cuts under ObamaCare to Medicare Advantage, the private option to Medicare that close to one-fourth of all seniors have chosen for their coverage under the program because it gives them a better deal. Mr. Foster estimates that 50% of all seniors with Medicare Advantage will lose their plan because of these cuts. Mr. Obama’s pledge that “If you like your health plan, you will be able to keep it” clearly does not apply to America’s seniors.
Finally, here’s the truth from another reliably right-wing source:
Among the many narratives injected into the public debate over health care reform, I find the most disturbing to be the notion that our senior citizens will experience cuts in their Medicare benefits as a result of Obamacare.
Despite the ‘doom and gloom’ predictions you may have heard, the proposed savings in Medicare are designed to come from two sources; (a) a crackdown on Medicare fraud, estimated to currently cost the federal government as much as $60 billion per year and (b) a reduction in what is paid to the Medicare Advantage programs offered by private insurance companies.
As you may be under the impression that the legislation will cut payments to physicians by 21 percent and institute draconian cuts in payments to hospitals, let’s set the record straight on this at the outset so we can dispose of this bit of disinformation.
Physicians have faced a 21 percent cut in payment from Medicare long before Obama became president and, thus, long before health care reform was more than a gleam in the eye of its proponents.
The threatened cuts are the result of a formula (“SGI”) established during the Clinton years that was designed to control the rate of growth in Medicare payments to physicians. The problem is that nobody anticipated that the number would go down. As a result of the decrease, and the understandable displeasure expressed by America’s doctors, Congress would end each year by deferring the cuts until they added up the 21 percent cut doctors now fear. Note that this number did not arise as a result of a stroke of the president’s pen as Obamacare detractors would have you believe. It was the constant deferral by Congress, dating back to 2002, that has permitted the number to reach this point.
It simply isn’t going to happen.
As for the hospitals, any cuts they will experience – estimated to be $155 billion over 10 years – are the direct result of negotiation and agreement between the Administration and the Hospital Associations. Nobody cut anything that the hospitals were not willing to accept as both reasonable and ‘doable.’
Lets move on to the real issues.
It is hard to imagine that anybody –- with the exception of the bad guys who are profiting handsomely from Medicare scams — can object to efforts to curtail this expensive and popular criminal activity. So extensive is Medicare crime that, in the city of Miami, the cocaine capital of America, Medicare fraud has now replaced the drug trade as the number one criminal activity in the city.
And why not?
Medicare criminals rarely get gunned down in their pursuit of easy money. The most substantial inconvenience these bad guys experience is shutting down their offices when the feds get onto them. Of course, they simply open up a new one under a different name and continue the fraud.
I’m sure that the cynical among you are scoffing at the notion that the federal government will now, as a result of health care reform, have more success cracking down on Medicare crime than they’ve had in the past.
You may be right.
To date, the government’s record on getting Medicare crime under control has been nothing short of abysmal. As a result, we will just have to wait and see if the CMS and Justice Department can do a better job of this.
As usual, Republicans want to have it both ways. When “Obamacare” targets waste and fraud, they terrify seniors with disinformation that casts seeking efficiency as draconian “cuts.”
But when they seek to eliminate waste and fraud, it’s just good ol’ GOP “plain cloth coat” fiscal responsibility.
It usually works — note how the New York Times let Issa’s assertion he’d eliminate $40 billion in waste and fraud pass without asking him if the Republicans’ quest for efficiencies were “cuts.”
That’s your “liberal media” for you, folks.
