Remember those Medicare Advantage cuts?
Do you recall that part of the path to the passage of Obamacare involved some manipulation in order to get the proper CBO scoring? There were a lot of aspects to that, including the delay of many of the bill’s provisions until 2014. One way in which costs were kept low enough was the future reduction of federal payments to insurance companies in the Medicare Advantage program.
Well, as with so many of the unpopular but seemingly necessary parts of Obamacare, those cuts have been suspended—at least till after the 2014 election. How very convenient:
Under cuts planned by the administration, insurers offering the plans were to see their federal payments reduced by 1.9 percent, which likely would have necessitated cuts for customers.
Instead, the administration said the federal payments to insurers will increase next year by .40 percent.
The healthcare law included $200 billion in cuts to Medicare Advantage over 10 years, in part to pay for ObamaCare.
The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) on Monday said changes in the healthcare market meant it did not need to make those cuts to Medicare Advantage this year.
It cited an increase in healthy beneficiaries under Medicare, which it said has lowered projected costs for that program…
The announcement comes after insurers spent millions on a public relations blitz seeking to head off the cuts, and after dozens of Democrats joined Republicans in calling on the administration to keep MA rates flat to avoid cutting benefits for seniors.
So, let’s see: the cuts were necessary to pass Obamacare. But they are poison at the ballot box, so there’s been pressure (from both sides, and insurance companies too) to call them off. Suddenly, as an explanation for their suspension, we find that old people have gotten healthier. Forgive me for being skeptical.
Republicans face a dilemma on this and myriad other issues connected with Obamacare. If they let all the terrible consequences of the original bill play out, it gives the Democrats ammunition for saying that Republicans want people to suffer. On the other hand, if Republicans block certain aspects of the bill that would make people feel pain (such as reductions in Medicare Advantage reimbursement), they increase their “compassionate” creds but they also improve the acceptability of Obamacare to the public, which is likely to end up blunting their own cause. Meanwhile, for most people, forgotten (if it was ever even known in the first place) is the hypocrisy and deception of the Democrats in perpetrating the original CBO scoring game, replaced by relief that Medicare Advantage will remain more or less the same for now.
So, what have we learned? We’re given a blueprint for how to manipulate future bills under consideration by Congress in order to get a good score from the CBO. Just put all sorts of cost-saving devices in there in order to pass muster, and then just cancel them afterward by executive order or other non-legislative approaches. As for the cost of Obamacare, we’ll worry about that later, after November 2014.
You can fool a lot of the people a lot of the time.
Song lyrics: And you lied, straight-faced, while I cried–or something much like that.
Most people have no idea what Medicare Advantage is. Even gray panthers that have it don’t understand it. My brother and sister-in-law are two such. When I told them their plan (Kaiser) was going to become more expensive under Obamacare, they maintained that Obamacare had nothing to do with their plan. Well, with this “miraculous” change in the law, they will not see any change and will aver that I’m full of BS.
And so it goes.
“You can fool a lot of the people…”
The person who said “you can’t fool all the people all the time” was surely right, but he missed the essential point as far as the future of the American republic is concerned: if you can fool a majority of the people a majority of the time, that’s all you need in order to hold power. And it seems that you can.
For Sam L: Tim Hardin singing Reason to Believe.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bW6VZi0ICs
It would be so much easier for the Dems to just buy the 2014 elections and the 2016 Presidency with cash out of the back of the truck.
$200 billion is not chump change. Costs will skyrocket, as will be easily demonstrated once the CBO gets to analyze the reversal.
On top of that, it will be quite easy to negate much of the political gain by reminding people that the president is a proven liar. How can anyone trust the cuts won’t be reinstated?
Hussein’s printing that much on his vacation and stuffing it into his pockets.
Zombies trust not in truth, but in something else.
This was so predictable that I predicted it.
Duh!