Why Romney Doesn’t ‘Preserve’ Traditional Medicare By Sy Mukherjee posted from ThinkProgress Health on Oct 6, 2012 at 12:15 pm
During Wednesday night’s presidential debate, Mitt Romney tried his very best to convince American seniors and future beneficiaries that his Medicare reform plan would not fundamentally alter the longstanding safety-net program’s structure. The Republican nominee painted his plan as a well-meaning experiment meant to inject some much-needed marketplace capitalism into the Medicare system, theoretically lowering the program’s cost and offering flexible, quality coverage options to future Americans, all while maintaining the benefits of traditional Medicare.
But Romney consistently obfuscated the details of his plan, which would actually result in massive cost-shifting onto consumers and fundamentally weaken the traditional Medicare entitlement. Here is what Romney said about Medicare Wednesday night:
…Number two is for people coming along that are young. What I’d do to make sure that we can keep Medicare in place for them is to allow them either to choose the current Medicare program or a private plan — their choice.They get to — and they’ll have at least two plans that will be entirely at no cost to them. So they don’t have to pay additional money, no additional $6,000. That’s not going to happen.
Setting aside the fact that Romney’s own stated desire to repeal Obamacare would raise the price of prescription drugs, preventative care, and Medicare Advantage premiums on current as well as future beneficiaries, Romney’s statements underplay just how radically his proposal — and the plan laid out by running mate Paul Ryan — would change Medicare for beneficiaries in 2023 and beyond.
From his comments during the debate, you would think that his plan is a simple alteration in Medicare’s funding mechanism, or an expansion of the kinds of private coverage plans available under Medicare Advantage. But that’s just not true. The Romney/Ryan plan would take Medicare, which is a “defined benefit” program, and turn it into a “defined contribution” program.
Basically, instead of the federal government guaranteeing that beneficiaries receive a host of defined services — as it does now — the federal government would instead set a hard budget for Medicare and then toss a chunk of cash at beneficiaries and let them choose from a host of private plans or traditional fee-for-service Medicare to get coverage. This means that if the calculated “premium support” subsidies for insurance and benchmark plans under the Romney/Ryan proposal do not cover all of a beneficiary’s needs, consumers would be forced to pay the difference out of pocket to get a plan that does. As health care costs rise, that will shift more and more financial burden onto consumers while their federal subsidies grow at a rate that simply can’t keep up with medical inflation.
As this Center for American Progress Action Fund study demonstrates, Romney/Ryan’s proposed voucher system would also weaken the traditional Medicare program, raising premiums as seniors spill over into private plans intentionally designed to attract healthier populations by providing cheaper benefits like preventative care, while leaving out more expensive benefits for the elderly such as long-term or intensive medical care. The existing Medicare pool, which would be left with a sicker population that needs Medicare’s expansive benefits, would consequently have much higher medical costs and rising premiums.
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Posted by CashCowMoo on :
Dont you ever get sick of "think progress"? They are more biased than Fox News, the one you complain is in the tank for the RNC.
Posted by raybond on :
Due you ever get sick of cheeseburgers?
Posted by CashCowMoo on :
No, I dont actually. They are so tasty.
Posted by glassman on :
quote:Originally posted by CashCowMoo: Dont you ever get sick of "think progress"? They are more biased than Fox News, the one you complain is in the tank for the RNC.
cash, it's like the Heritage Foundation for crying out loud.. not a network news outlet...
Posted by CashCowMoo on :
Oh but they are touted as a news outlet.
Posted by glassman on :
quote:Originally posted by CashCowMoo: Oh but they are touted as a news outlet.
by who? Faux news? sheesh cash, the Heritage Foundation follows the same exact protocols and does the same exact thing, they just aren't as well disseminated as think progress.
think progress is a non-profit... so are about half dozen conservative think tanks...
until you stop playing into hteir hand? you doom conservative thinking, there's no consrvative itnellectuals left cuz the conservatives don't want it, they wan the lowest common denominator..
the problem is that Republicanism is supposed to be about knowing the masses are not supposed to be making the real decisions, somehow the GOP has become the party of idjits.
check this idjit out, the earht is only a few thousand years old, and he's in Congress and decides how to fund science research? we are doomed as nation with thinking like this:
fanatics like this have no business leading our country:
Rep. Paul Collins Broun, Jr. M.D.
Representative Paul C. Broun, Jr. was elected in July of 2007 to serve the Tenth District of Georgia. Since his arrival in Congress, he has been appointed to the House Homeland Security Committee, the House Committee on Natural Resources, and currently serves as Chairman of the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee for the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. Dr. Broun grew up in Athens, Georgia where he attended Athens High School and graduated from the University of Georgia in 1967 with a B.S. in Chemistry. In 1971, he received his Medical Doctor degree from the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta. An internship at Good Samaritan Hospital in Portland, Oregon and a residency at University Hospital in Birmingham, Alabama followed.
he is the face of American Taliban,
American is folding like a cheap lawn chair and it's guys like this that are making it happen on PURPOSE
Posted by CashCowMoo on :
quote:Originally posted by glassman:
quote:Originally posted by CashCowMoo: Oh but they are touted as a news outlet.
by who? Faux news? sheesh cash, the Heritage Foundation follows the same exact protocols and does the same exact thing, they just aren't as well disseminated as think progress.
think progress is a non-profit... so are about half dozen conservative think tanks...
until you stop playing into hteir hand? you doom conservative thinking, there's no consrvative itnellectuals left cuz the conservatives don't want it, they wan the lowest common denominator..
the problem is that Republicanism is supposed to be about knowing the masses are not supposed to be making the real decisions, somehow the GOP has become the party of idjits.
check this idjit out, the earht is only a few thousand years old, and he's in Congress and decides how to fund science research? we are doomed as nation with thinking like this:
fanatics like this have no business leading our country:
Rep. Paul Collins Broun, Jr. M.D.
Representative Paul C. Broun, Jr. was elected in July of 2007 to serve the Tenth District of Georgia. Since his arrival in Congress, he has been appointed to the House Homeland Security Committee, the House Committee on Natural Resources, and currently serves as Chairman of the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee for the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. Dr. Broun grew up in Athens, Georgia where he attended Athens High School and graduated from the University of Georgia in 1967 with a B.S. in Chemistry. In 1971, he received his Medical Doctor degree from the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta. An internship at Good Samaritan Hospital in Portland, Oregon and a residency at University Hospital in Birmingham, Alabama followed.
he is the face of American Taliban,
American is folding like a cheap lawn chair and it's guys like this that are making it happen on PURPOSE
Oh yeah the short earthers. I cant stand that. I believe in creationism AND evolution. Our planet is what...4 billion years old or so?
Posted by glassman on :
I believe in creationism AND evolution. Our planet is what...4 billion years old or so?
and i constaltnly point out to my atheist friends that they Scientifically cannot repudiate the existence of God cashcowmoo. because absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence.
there are any number of very good cases to be made for a certain amount of creationism or intellectual intervention. it's even more humourous to me when the genetic modifiers who are sorting out this new "language" of DNA in order to "improve" living things for our benefit want to deny a God (any God)... accidents hapen, but coincidences? not in my opinion.
we are pretty much forced to acknowledge that Evlution is a God-Product at minimum....
and it is even herder to reconcile a God that concerns itself with our day-to-day affiars (like if we are gay, or married to four women and a horse on the trail)....
Deism recognises that there IS a God of nature, and that assigning of a God to even a gender is simply being superstitious....