Reid: I'm So Totally Stoked My Health Care Reform Bill Will "Save" $127 Billion Over Ten Years, Which Is Less than October's One Month Deficit

The latest sham number coming from the Democrats.

Among the reasons it is sham: It proposes $500 billion in Medicare "cuts" that 1, are likely to never, ever happen, or 2, which represent a true and undeniable reduction of services to the elderly. One or the other, or some mix of both.

First of all, let's look at the so-called "doctor fix" which is being used to bribe the AMA to support this abortion. In 1997, the government passed, supposedly, cuts to how much doctors would be paid under Medicare to "bend the curve" of long-term costs. (Sound familiar?)

Doctors quickly lobbied Congress, noting they were already taking a bath on Medicare patients, and if they were forced to take less money still, they'd have to begin turning them away.

Every year or two since then Congress has passed a "doctor fix" suspending the supposedly-required cuts to the payment schedule. Every year the AMA lobbies to have the "cuts" put off another year, and every year Congress does so.

Now, in 2009, to pay off the AMA -- which is frankly sick of lobbying for this legislation every year -- Obama and the Democrats propose the "doctor fix," a ten year suspension of cuts that were supposedly mandated back in 1997.

For 12 years these cuts have been put off on a year-by-year basis. To pay off the AMA for its purchased support, a "doctor fix" will be passed suspending the phantom cuts for 10 more years.

Obama's plan will supposedly save money by reducing Medicare payments to the tune or $500 or $600 billion. And yet we have an instance here of cuts that were already suspended for 12 years and are now to be suspended for another 10, making what was supposed to be an effort to reduce long-term costs of federal health spending beginning in 1997 suspended until at least 2019.

And what do you think the odds are of the cuts taking place in 2019, when now we will have a full twenty-two year backlog of yearly cuts which are supposed to happen? I.e., in 2019, will doctor's rates really be rolled back to what they were supposed to be in 1997, 22 years earlier?

No: They will never occur.

And the cost of the ten year doctor fix? $250 billion, or thereabouts.

But Congress is supposedly quite serious, now, about carving $600 billion out of Medicare, and no sirree Bob, they won't be similarly suspending "required cuts" into the approximate timeframe of the events depicted in Dune.

Now, supposing, hypothetically, these cuts do in fact happen? Then seniors are denied about $600 billion in services they're now receiving. If you can follow this logic, we'll be saving money by denying seniors preventative, precautionary testing, because such tests are "unnecessary" when it comes to the elderly, while also saving money by providing the young and currently uninsured with preventative, precautionary testing, which is not only good medicine for the young, but also necessary, because testing early and often when it comes to the young actually saves us money in the long term. (Actually, it doesn't, and the CBO already said so, but notice how the same tests are "unnecessary" for the old and vitally necessary for the young.)

As I keep saying: We are talking here about taking $600 billion in benefits from a demographic that doesn't vote for Barack Obama in order to give it to a demographic that does, and nobody is supposed to notice this.

Incidentally, the doctor fix itself is therefore part and parcel of Obama's "reforms" and yet is being kept out of the bill itself so that the CBO is required (by law) to ignore it and report back, falsely, that the plan "saves" $127 billion.

It doesn't. First things first, the $250 billion doctor fix wipes that out and then some, and then on top of it, the CBO knows, but is not allowed to say, that Congress will likely not be cutting the alleged $600 billion in "savings," ever.

Let me just put in a centimeter, just to see how it feels.

Okay.

2074 Pages... And senators will have a full three days to read it before voting.

2074 pages. For your reading pleasure.

posted by Ace at 07:04 PM

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