Staff Report
Medicare and Medicaid should not be sacrificed to serve the deficit reduction objectives of Republicans Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan,” said Louis Tharp, healthcare advocate and executive director of the Global Healthy Living Foundation.
“The cuts would shift an unbearable financial burden onto the majority of Americans and small businesses, preventing the country’s economic improvement — the stated goal of the GOP,” Tharp said. “Not only that, their cuts would actually increase the national deficit.”
In an editorial, the New York Times agreed.
The Congressional Budget Office concluded that repealing the law would raise the deficit by $109 billion over 10 years.
The Republicans gave no clue about how they would pay for restoring the Medicare cuts without increasing the deficit. It is hard to believe that, if faced with the necessity of fashioning a realistic budget, keeping Medicare spending high would be a top priority with a Romney-Ryan administration that also wants to spend very large sums on the military and on tax cuts for wealthy Americans.
Tom Dickinson wrote in a Rolling Stone article that Medicare recipients under the Romney-Ryan plan would also churn through their healthcare finances at a much higher clip than the current program.
Dickinson wrote:
[Paul] Ryan privatizes medical insurance for the elderly, sending future seniors out into the individual market with a voucher that covers what the government now pays for each senior’s Medicare.
Ryan hits the elderly two ways. First: The same money buys far less in the individual market than it does with government acting as the single payer. Right off the bat, seniors will be forced to pay more for the same coverage, with insurers reaping the windfall profit.
Second: The voucher isn’t pegged to healthcare inflation, which ranges far above regular inflation. The voucher system would neatly cap the cost to Uncle Sam, but it would shift those spiraling costs onto seniors living on fixed incomes.
Ryan’s cost shifting starts out painful — doubling the out-of-pocket costs for a 65-year-old in 2022 — but becomes absurdly draconian in the out years. In 2050, according to an analysis by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, an 85-year-old would have to spend more than $50,000 over and above their voucher to afford a policy as decent as present-day Medicare.
Just contemplating the elimination of Medicare in favor of the private market is troubling, Tharp said.
“In the face of decades of history which show Medicare to be the most efficient healthcare delivery system in the U.S. — with costs substantially lower than any private system — and despite millions of Americans who rely on Medicare and Medicaid, and despite the fact that millions more Americans are going to be entering the Medicaid system under the Affordable Care Act, our country is seriously discussing how to cripple this most compassionate, effective and competitive government program,” Tharp said.
In an editorial, the New York Times wrote that the Romney-Ryan cuts make Medicare less efficient, and drive up the costs for everyone, including the healthcare industry.
The Times wrote:
The Republicans imply that the $716 billion in cuts [found in the Affordable Care Act] will harm older Americans, but almost none of the savings come from reducing the benefits available for people already on Medicare. But if Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan were able to repeal the reform law, as they have pledged to do, that would drive up costs for many seniors — namely those with high prescription drug costs, who are already receiving subsidies under the reform law, and those who are receiving preventive services, like colonoscopies, mammograms and immunizations, with no cost sharing.
Mr. Romney argued on Friday that the $716 billion in cuts will harm beneficiaries because those who get discounts or extra benefits in the heavily subsidized Medicare Advantage plans will lose them and because reduced payments to hospitals and other providers could cause some providers to stop accepting Medicare patients.
If he thinks that will be a major problem, Mr. Romney should leave the reform law in place: it has many provisions designed to make the delivery of health care more efficient and cheaper, so that hospitals and others will be better able to survive on smaller payments.
Think Progress also took a strong stance on the proposed GOP cuts.
Think Progress wrote:
The most astounding part of Romney’s attack is that he accuses the president of cutting Medicare by more than $700 billion despite the fact that the exact same Medicare savings are included in the Romney-Ryan budget, which Mitt Romney has eagerly embraced, said he would sign, and whose architect is now his running mate. The real scandal is that while Obamacare reinvests these savings back into Medicare to make it stronger, offer seniors new benefits, and close the prescription drug donut hole, the Romney-Ryan budget steals that same $700 billion and uses it pay for new tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans and huge corporations.
And worst of all, Romney and Ryan want to end Medicare as we know it and turn it into a voucher program that shifts costs to seniors. Under their original plan, seniors will pay about $6,000 a year more for their health care so millionaires can pay even less in taxes. Under a different version of their plan to end Medicare, seniors are instead stuck with steep premium increases. Either way, seniors will pay a steep price for Romney and Ryan’s huge new tax breaks for the wealthiest.
“These proposed cuts all around trump compassion in an industry founded upon the creed of ‘do no harm,’” Tharp said. “We are the richest country on earth. It is well within our grasp to take care of the elderly and sick. Why aren’t we doing that?”
“In 1964, nearly half of all seniors were uninsured, making the elderly among the least likely Americans to have health insurance,” Politifact wrote in a 2011 fact-checking report. Virtually all of the elderly have health insurance today.
Politifact also wrote that in 1959, 35.2 percent of American senior citizens were living below the poverty line. Thanks to a combination of Medicare and Social Security, that number dropped to 8.9 percent in 2009.
Through the combination of Social Security and Medicare, 55 percent of Americans over the age of 65 lived below the poverty line. Thanks to Medicare, now only 10 percent live in poverty.
Private insurance just wasn’t within the reach of these patients due to its high cost.
“Quite simply, many firms put excess profit over access to care in the private healthcare insurance market,” Tharp said. “And if their actions were allowed to take over Medicare, healthcare would continue to be a privilege for the privileged — not a right, not an integral piece of what is necessary for a strong, competitive and moral country.”
Republican president candidate Mitt Romney touts a plan of Medicare cuts that, as Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar wrote in an Associated Press article, could make the program’s trust fund insolvent near the end of his first term.
Alonso-Zaldivar writes:
[The Affordable Care Act] extended the life of Medicare’s giant trust fund. By repealing them, Romney would move the program’s insolvency eight years closer, toward the end of what would be his first term in office.
Instead of running out of money in 2024, Medicare’s trust fund for inpatient care would go broke in 2016 without the cuts, according to estimates by the program’s own experts.
…
[The Affordable Care Act] cuts were not … aimed at Medicare’s 48 million beneficiaries; instead they affect hospitals, insurers, nursing homes, drug companies and other service providers. Simply undoing the cuts [as Romney wants to do] would restore higher payments to those service providers. And that would cause Medicare to spend money faster.
…
“The fact of the matter is, what Romney is proposing now is to roll all that back, which would mean that Medicare would reach insolvency eight years earlier, which would mean that seniors would lose benefits,” David Axelrod, a senior political adviser to Obama, said Thursday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
These cuts aren’t just dangerous to patients’ finances. The healthcare they produce can harm patients’ actual illness and treatment management.
“Not only do cuts trump compassion, but, in many cases, cuts trump science — whether it’s a Medicaid patient who can’t find a provider and stays sick, or a comfortable upper-middle-class executive denied medication based upon economic criteria and must ‘fail first’ on a drug not at all prescribed by his/her physician,” Tharp said.
Though it may be difficult to imagine an America without them, federally-funded social programs such as Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, and Head Start were greatly opposed at their creation.
“When they were being debated — special interests, devoted to sustaining the status quo that served them well — fought hard to prevent these valuable programs from becoming law,” said Seth Ginsberg, president of the Global Health Living Foundation. “Today the same dance is occurring. Senators like Max Baucus, who has accepted nearly $3 million from the health insurance lobby, are trying to deny Americans the right to healthcare.”
Patients in other countries with nationalized healthcare services may advocate for improvements in their programs. But almost never do these patients ask for a system like America’s.
Tellingly, the British exalted their National Health Service to the world in their recent 2012 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony in London.
“Patients in foreign countries all agree that they do not want anything even close to the American healthcare system,” Tharp said. “They could not imagine, for example, citizens of their country going bankrupt to pay for healthcare. But in the U.S. it is common.”
The current overall effect of healthcare on U.S. patients is bleak.
In 2007, 62 percent of bankruptcies in the U.S. — more than half a million — were linked to medical expenses. Eighty percent of those filing actually had health insurance. And this was before the great recession hit the following year.
“This is more than unfortunate,” Ginsberg said. “It’s embarrassing. It’s cruel. It’s unnecessary.
“Why tout American exceptionalism to the world when we as a society might forego taking care of our own?”
Tharp says ideologues are hijacking the conversation, working to convince Americans that nearly all government is bad. This despite the fact that the majority of Americans support federally-provided programs such as Medicare and Social Security.
“Paul Ryan’s entry into the presidential race has put Medicare into dangerous crosshairs like never before,” Ginsberg said. “But this is not a Democratic/Republican fight. It’s not a conservative/liberal fight. It is a special interest vs. the public good fight.”
The public good cannot lose that fight, Tharp said.
“When the public good loses to special interests, the loss is immediate as well as generational,” Tharp said. “And long after the arguments are forgotten, the harshness and unfairness remains institutionalized– a part of the social fabric that quashes our dreams, increases our stress, and shortens our lives.”
