They fought for Obama's Healthcare bill so hard even though it cuts Medicare by $550 Billion starting in 2012, but now they are screaming that the Republicans want to hurt seniors and cut Medicare. Why is that?
The Viking wrote: They fought for Obama's Healthcare bill so hard even though it cuts Medicare by $550 Billion starting in 2012, but now they are screaming that the Republicans want to hurt seniors and cut Medicare. Why is that?
The House Republicans didn't really argue with cutting Medicare spending by $500 billion or so, not that it was supposed to cut benefits. But it's all black magic anyway...
The Facts
First of all, under the health care bill, Medicare spending continues to go up year after year. The health care bill tries to identify ways to save money, and so the $500 billion figure comes from the difference over 10 years between anticipated Medicare spending (what is known as “the baseline”) and the changes the law makes to reduce spending. (Look at slide 15 of this nifty tutorial on the law’s impact on Medicare by the Kaiser Family Foundation to see a chart of the year by year savings.)
The savings actually are wrung from health-care providers, not Medicare beneficiaries. These spending reductions presumably would be a good thing, since virtually everyone agrees that Medicare spending is out of control. In the House Republican budget, lawmakers repealed the Obama health care law but retained all but $10 billion of the nearly $500 billion in Medicare savings, suggesting the actual policies enacted to achieve these spending reductions were not that objectionable to GOP lawmakers.
