At a cost of $700,000 of taxpayers’ money, Andy Griffith is on the air peddling President Obama’s propaganda about how wonderful ObamaCare is going to be for Medicare. He doesn’t have a clue as to what he is talking about.
The Obama administration itself released a report this week confessing that ObamaCare cuts $575 billion from Medicare over the first 10 years alone. The cuts will soar to $126 billion for just one year by 2019.
Obama is also trying to hide how high the Medicare cuts accumulate over the longer term by delaying the annual report of the Medicare Board of Trustees. That report is usually out every year by April or May. But this year the report is still nowhere to be found.
However, budget documents released during the ObamaCare debate indicate that the Medicare cuts will total $2.9 trillion over the first 20 years.
Most commentators have assumed that Obama and congressional Democrats would never go through with such draconian cuts in Medicare. The expectation has been that they would reverse most or all these Medicare cuts, just adding further to the deficit.
But given that the Obama administration is out with a report this week openly bragging about these supposed “savings” to Medicare due to ObamaCare, how can they just reverse such “savings” later this year?
So now, Obama sends out Andy Griffith to say in his propaganda commercial, “This year, like always, we’ll have our guaranteed [Medicare] benefits.” Obama thinks he can play seniors with this line that ObamaCare does not involve any cuts in “guaranteed” Medicare benefits.
Actually, based on legal precedent, there are no “guaranteed” benefits in Medicare. But that is not the real reason why this rhetoric is so misleading and, indeed, abusive.
The real sleight of hand in the Andy Griffith TV spot is that, while ObamaCare does not cut any of the stated benefits of Medicare, it slashes by literally trillions of dollars the payments to doctors and hospitals for providing those benefits.
Such draconian Medicare cuts would create havoc and chaos in health care for seniors. Doctors, hospitals, surgeons and specialists providing critical care to the elderly such as surgery for hip and knee replacements, sophisticated diagnostics through MRIs and CT scans, and even treatment for cancer and heart disease will shut down and disappear in much of the country, and others would stop serving Medicare patients.
Seniors have become so dependent on Medicare that, if the government is not going to pay, then seniors are not going to get the health services, treatment and care they expect.
Rather than reforming Medicare to make it sustainable for the future, ObamaCare undermines its foundation while the Obama White House sends out Andy Griffith to slap on a new coat of paint to hide the cracks in the walls.
How stupid does Obama think America’s seniors are? As former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, now president of the Center for Health Transformation, explains in his new book, To Save America:
“Clearly, you cannot cut Medicare by more than half a trillion dollars and not jeopardize seniors’ access to care. Medicare access is already declining. The Mayo Clinic announced that on January 1, 2010, its Arizona facilities would stop seeing Medicare beneficiaries because the federal government does not pay the clinic enough to even cover its costs. According to Lynn Closway, spokeswoman for Mayo, the clinic lost $840 million in 2008 treating Medicare patients. And that’s before the Democrats’ half a trillion in cuts.”
Indeed, the Chief Actuary for Medicare admits that many doctors and hospitals serving seniors will go out of business because of the ObamaCare Medicare cuts.
Besides the draconian cuts to doctors and hospitals serving seniors, the ObamaCare Medicare cuts include $145 billion in cuts to Medicare Advantage over the first 10 years alone. Medicare Advantage is the private option to Medicare that close to one fourth of all seniors has chosen for their coverage under Medicare because it gives them a better deal.
But, again, Medicare’s own Chief Actuary estimates that 50 percent of all seniors with Medicare Advantage will lose that coverage because of these cuts. So much for Obama’s pledge that under his health care scheme, “If you like your health plan, you will be able to keep it.”
But even this is not all of the cuts to Medicare under ObamaCare. The law also establishes a Medicare Independent Payment Advisory Board, an unelected, appointed body with the power to adopt further Medicare cuts it deems necessary.
These cuts would become effective without further congressional action. The Medicare Chief Actuary reports “The Secretary of HHS is required to implement the board’s recommendations unless the statutory process is overridden by new legislation.”
While Obama thinks he can play seniors for fools, this fall America’s seniors will send back their own message, “We won’t get fooled again.”
Lawrence A. Hunter, Ph.D. is the president of the Social Security Institute.
