The $716 billion figure is correct. What’s incorrect is what the video is implying about Medicare benefits being reduced. No benefit changes result. What will change are the reimbursements that hospitals are agreeing to accept, and the cost overruns that the Medicare Advantage program unexpectedly led to.
@Greg: Advocation of slavery is so typical of you libs. You think you have a right to the labor of others. You wouldn’t take a 30% wage cut in your own life (assuming you have a job), but you have no problem decreeing that doctors and hospitals take one.
Greg
12 years ago
I know someone who just went through outpatient chemotherapy for cancer at a cost of around $16,000 per session. Four sessions per week administered on alternate weeks; a total of 24 sessions. That’s $384,000 for the outpatient facility services, the drugs, and the lab work. The doctor’s bills are yet to come. Throw in a 10-day ICU hospitalization, owing to nearly fatal side effects from the initial week of chemo, and the total is something well in excess of $400,000. Fortunately there’s Medicare and a good secondary insurance involved.
It’s enough to convince most people that some measure of cost control might be in order.
We all know you know a guy, yada, yada. But tell me this: if $7.16 billion is going to come out of Medicare funds to pay for Obamacare’s newly covered, then where is the money to cover Medicare patients going to come from. You seem to think that if you have $1oo in your bank account and write a check foer $25 that you can still spend $100.
It doesn’t work that way. That is why Obamacare has unelected 15 member panel to determine what services of Medicare WILL be cut.
The $716 billion will come from cost saving measures: Over time, medical product and service providers will see that much lost to reduced reimbursements. In other words, the government is imposing that degree of new cost controls by deciding that they will be paying that much less.
The up side for product and service providers is that they will have an increased number of covered customers, and fewer non-insured, non-paying people that they’ll have to subsidize.
Conservatives will object on principal. Not being a conservative, I have little trouble with it. It seems to me that getting a handle on the uncontrolled escalation of public health care costs is absolutely essential if rising deficits are ever going to be brought under control.
Conservative politicians who will complain have actually engaged in exactly the opposite behavior. Irresponsible provisions of Medicare Part D, for example, have given the private sector far too much control over how much public money they can extract for drugs and services. Why should the Medicare Part D program have been deliberately locked into paying far higher prices for drugs that the Veterans Administration gets more cheaply, for example? Is that a free market system at work, or a contrived mechanism for shaking down the taxpayer?
The right automatically objects to any suggestion of socialism in service of the public. What about the budget-busting corporate socialism that’s equally responsible for running deficits into the stratosphere?
johngalt
12 years ago
Greg said;
The $716 billion will come from cost saving measures: Over time, medical product and service providers will see that much lost to reduced reimbursements.
I’ve got news for people. The hospitals, other medical service providers, and medical product manufacturers will still see their profits. How? Because those of us who have non-Obama insurance, or still choose to pay the fine tax and pay for our bills ourselves, will have our rates, or bills, increased.
This is much the same way that when the taxes on businesses go up, the costs of products and services to consumers goes up, even as the politicians claim they are making things “fair”.
The middle class that still work, and do not receive medicare benefits, will be the ones left holding the bag when it comes time to pay up. Obama, and his liberal/progressive sycophants, claim no increase in middle class taxes, but that’s only technically correct. In reality, the middle class are the ones paying for it, even if only by proxy.
What about the budget-busting corporate socialism that’s equally responsible for running deficits into the stratosphere?
I’d like to see your rationale for that, Greg. I would agree to a point. The problem is, you believe it is solely due to GOP or conservative policies. You couldn’t be more wrong on that.
The truth is, the deficits went “into the stratosphere” by the passage of the stimulus bill in 2009. Nearly a Trillion dollars of spending, most of which went on the government books as mandatory spending, earning an average 4-7% spending increase each year.
The truth is, the democrats, under Obama during his first two years, initiated massive amounts of outrageous spending that are still on the books, and will be still, even after Romney is elected. Crony capitalism? As much as Obama demonized it during his first campaign, he jumped into the mud with all the other pigs quicker than you could blink.
And you and your liberal/progressive friends blame all of it on who?
You poor fools don’t even know your being led around by the chains you put on yourselves.
This must be so humiliating for the Lamestream Media. Even Ezra Klein of the Washington Post was forced to admit that the $716 billion figure is correct. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/14/romneys-right-obamacare-cuts-medicare-by-716-billion-heres-how/
The $716 billion figure is correct. What’s incorrect is what the video is implying about Medicare benefits being reduced. No benefit changes result. What will change are the reimbursements that hospitals are agreeing to accept, and the cost overruns that the Medicare Advantage program unexpectedly led to.
These are the conclusions drawn by the Washington Post article that was cited in post #1.
@Greg: Advocation of slavery is so typical of you libs. You think you have a right to the labor of others. You wouldn’t take a 30% wage cut in your own life (assuming you have a job), but you have no problem decreeing that doctors and hospitals take one.
I know someone who just went through outpatient chemotherapy for cancer at a cost of around $16,000 per session. Four sessions per week administered on alternate weeks; a total of 24 sessions. That’s $384,000 for the outpatient facility services, the drugs, and the lab work. The doctor’s bills are yet to come. Throw in a 10-day ICU hospitalization, owing to nearly fatal side effects from the initial week of chemo, and the total is something well in excess of $400,000. Fortunately there’s Medicare and a good secondary insurance involved.
It’s enough to convince most people that some measure of cost control might be in order.
@Greg:
We all know you know a guy, yada, yada. But tell me this: if $7.16 billion is going to come out of Medicare funds to pay for Obamacare’s newly covered, then where is the money to cover Medicare patients going to come from. You seem to think that if you have $1oo in your bank account and write a check foer $25 that you can still spend $100.
It doesn’t work that way. That is why Obamacare has unelected 15 member panel to determine what services of Medicare WILL be cut.
@retire05, #5:
The $716 billion will come from cost saving measures: Over time, medical product and service providers will see that much lost to reduced reimbursements. In other words, the government is imposing that degree of new cost controls by deciding that they will be paying that much less.
The up side for product and service providers is that they will have an increased number of covered customers, and fewer non-insured, non-paying people that they’ll have to subsidize.
Conservatives will object on principal. Not being a conservative, I have little trouble with it. It seems to me that getting a handle on the uncontrolled escalation of public health care costs is absolutely essential if rising deficits are ever going to be brought under control.
Conservative politicians who will complain have actually engaged in exactly the opposite behavior. Irresponsible provisions of Medicare Part D, for example, have given the private sector far too much control over how much public money they can extract for drugs and services. Why should the Medicare Part D program have been deliberately locked into paying far higher prices for drugs that the Veterans Administration gets more cheaply, for example? Is that a free market system at work, or a contrived mechanism for shaking down the taxpayer?
The right automatically objects to any suggestion of socialism in service of the public. What about the budget-busting corporate socialism that’s equally responsible for running deficits into the stratosphere?
Greg said;
I’ve got news for people. The hospitals, other medical service providers, and medical product manufacturers will still see their profits. How? Because those of us who have non-Obama insurance, or still choose to pay the
finetax and pay for our bills ourselves, will have our rates, or bills, increased.This is much the same way that when the taxes on businesses go up, the costs of products and services to consumers goes up, even as the politicians claim they are making things “fair”.
The middle class that still work, and do not receive medicare benefits, will be the ones left holding the bag when it comes time to pay up. Obama, and his liberal/progressive sycophants, claim no increase in middle class taxes, but that’s only technically correct. In reality, the middle class are the ones paying for it, even if only by proxy.
@Greg:
I’d like to see your rationale for that, Greg. I would agree to a point. The problem is, you believe it is solely due to GOP or conservative policies. You couldn’t be more wrong on that.
The truth is, the deficits went “into the stratosphere” by the passage of the stimulus bill in 2009. Nearly a Trillion dollars of spending, most of which went on the government books as mandatory spending, earning an average 4-7% spending increase each year.
The truth is, the democrats, under Obama during his first two years, initiated massive amounts of outrageous spending that are still on the books, and will be still, even after Romney is elected. Crony capitalism? As much as Obama demonized it during his first campaign, he jumped into the mud with all the other pigs quicker than you could blink.
And you and your liberal/progressive friends blame all of it on who?
You poor fools don’t even know your being led around by the chains you put on yourselves.