NYT just published an article that says if Romney was to restore the $716 billion in Medicare savings from Obamacare that it would cause seniors to pay more than $300 a year in higher premiums. Something tells me that Obama and the Democrats will use this article down the road when they do go after Romney and Republicans on their Medicare scheme.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
If the Democrats were not spending the rest of the week hitting Romney and the Republicans on their war on women, I would have predicted that this new NYT article out tonight would be topic number one tomorrow. However, this tidbit will be saved for when Obama and the Democrats REALLY go after the Republicans and Romney on Romney's stupid plan to put back the $716 billion back into Medicare. Not only will it cause Medicare to become insolvent in 4 years (instead of 12 years because of Obamacare), but it will also increase seniors' premiums by hundreds of dollars per year.
While Republicans have raised legitimate questions about the long-term feasibility of the reimbursement cuts, analysts say, to restore them in the short term would immediately add hundreds of dollars a year to out-of-pocket Medicare expenses for beneficiaries. That would violate Mr. Romney’s vow that neither current beneficiaries nor Americans within 10 years of eligibility would be affected by his proposal to shift Medicare to a voucherlike system in which recipients are given a lump sum to buy coverage from competing insurers.
It is such a bad idea that a health care specialist has this to say:
For those reasons, Henry J. Aaron, an economist and a longtime health policy analyst at the Brookings Institution and the Institute of Medicine, called Mr. Romney’s vow to repeal the savings “both puzzling and bogus at the same time.”
So how much more money would seniors have to pay per year?
Marilyn Moon, vice president and director of the health program at the American Institutes for Research, calculated that restoring the $716 billion in Medicare savings would increase premiums and co-payments for beneficiaries by $342 a year on average over the next decade; in 2022, the average increase would be $577.
Add that to the higher costs for seniors if the doughnut hole is reopened and wellness visits & preventative care are no longer free if Romney gets his way and Obamacare is repealed.
And those costs would be on top of the costs involved with a full repeal of the health care law, which would eliminate expanded coverage of prescription drugs, free wellness care and preventive checkups.
Health care specialists are questioning the smarts and the reasons why the Romney campaign is advocating this.
One can only wonder what’s going on inside their headquarters in Boston and among their policy people,” said John McDonough, the director of the Center for Public Health Leadership at Harvard. “But there are only two explanations: Either they don’t understand how the program works, which is hard to imagine, or there is some deliberate misrepresentation here because they know how politically potent this charge is.”
In conclusion, Chris Van Hollen says it best.
“The bottom line,” said Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee, which Mr. Ryan leads, “is that Romney is proposing to take more money from seniors in higher premiums and co-pays and hand it over to private insurance companies and other providers in the Medicare system.”