Obama Flip-Flop: Rails Against Vouchers…Next Day He Sends 2 Million Seniors Into Vouchers

Spread the love

Loading

Ed Morrissey @ Hot Air:

I know that every campaign promise Barack Obama makes has an expiration date … but this is ridiculous.  The confetti is barely off the floor at the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte, North Carolina after Obama’s acceptance speech, and alreadywe find out that he’s flip-flopped.  Remember this part of the speech, in which he attacks the Paul Ryan plan to apply free-market reform and cost controls to Medicare?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaCTuFplVQc[/youtube]

And I will — I will never turn Medicare into a voucher.

No American should ever have to spend their golden years at the mercy of insurance companies. They should retire with the care and the dignity they have earned. Yes, we will reform and strengthen Medicare for the long haul, but we’ll do it by reducing the cost of health care, not by asking seniors to pay thousands of dollars more. And we will keep the promise of Social Security by taking the responsible steps to strengthen it, not by turning it over to Wall Street.

Expiration date — the very next day:

In his convention speech in Charlotte, President Obama vowed to block the Republican Medicare reform plan because “no American should ever have to spend their golden years at the mercy of insurance companies.”

But back in Washington, his Health and Human Services Department is launching a pilot program that would shift up to 2 million of the poorest and most-vulnerable seniors out of the federal Medicare program and into private health insurance plans overseen by the states.

The administration has accepted applications from 18 states to participate in the program, which would give states money to purchase managed-care plans for people who are either disabled or poor enough to qualify for both Medicare and Medicaid. HHS approved the first state plan, one forMassachusetts, last month.

Bear in mind that Ryan’s plan made the vouchers optional; seniors could choose the traditional government-run Medicare plan or opt for a private insurance plan from a federal exchange of approved insurers.  Ryan also allows all seniors to choose, and didn’t force the poorest seniors to take the voucher option.  Not only will Obama push just the poorest seniors into this plan, in some states they’d have to know to opt back in to traditional Medicare:

Read more

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of

3 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

It’s true.
Obama probably didn’t know about it.
He’s fairly oblivious.
But, since he’s a lawyer (ha!) does he realize personal checks and even government checks are ”vouchers?”
Does he realize our paper money are ”vouchers,”too?
Obama is an idiot who only reads what others put in front of him.
He lets stupid people write his speeches.
Makes him look even dumber.
Who knows?
These 2 million poorest Medicare recipients might end up being the best off of all of them!

It looks like Obama is trying to implement Ryan’s plan before Ryan has a chance! Maybe that says something about the other ideas Romney and Ryan have that the left have been trying to discredit.

Ed Morrisey has updated this post because liberals, like one here on another thread, object to calling this a voucher program….

Update: A couple of commenters object to my description of this as a “voucher” program — but that’s how Democrats describe Ryan’s plan, and that doesn’t have “vouchers,” either.
It’s a premium-support plan in a federal exchange of insurance plans approved by Medicare for coverage.
That’s what Medicare Advantage did too, and Obama raided it to pay for the Medicaid expansion in ObamaCare.
This plan doesn’t even have the federal exchange that Ryan envisioned, but fifty different exchanges doling out federal dollars.
Like I wrote, the plan and the experiment is worth trying, but it’s precisely the kind of push into private insurance that Obama swore the day earlier he’d never do … and he’s doing it with the poorest seniors with only an opt-out in some states rather than the opt-in that Ryan’s plan provided.
I’ll put quote marks on “voucher” in the headline, but this mechanism only differs from Ryan’s in that the exchanges get managed by the states rather than Medicare.

If Obama supporters don’t like the term “vouchers” or want to gripe about its accuracy, look first to the beam in thine own eye.