Facing the Medicare Debate Head-On

What Democrats have said in the past about the sustainability of Medicare and how they are approaching the problem, now that they have gutted the program through Obamacare, is a lesson in obfuscation.  They care about power, not solutions.

Excerpt: The President and other supporters have claimed that Obamacare would help protect seniors. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office just updated its estimate of the amount Obamacare steals from Medicare to fund itself—a whopping $716 billion between 2013 and 2022.

As Heritage’s Alyene Senger wrote, “With a raid on Medicare of this magnitude, President Obama’s assertion that his new law is protecting seniors and Medicare is astonishing. The truth is that Obamacare does the opposite.”

If anyone starts talking about “ending Medicare as we know it,” you can easily tell him that Obamacare already did that. In addition to robbing Medicare of its funding, Obamacare contains more than 160 provisions affecting Medicare.

The good news is that there are several strong plans for Medicare reform that could salvage the program for the next generation of retirees.

The Heritage Foundation has developed a Medicare premium support plan as part of its comprehensive budget reform, Saving the American Dream. With premium support, the government makes a fixed payment to a health plan chosen by an enrollee. If an enrollee wants to purchase a plan that is more expensive than the government payment, the enrollee may do so, paying the additional cost. If an enrollee wants to buy a less expensive plan, the enrollee may also do so, and keep the savings.

Under this model, health plans would compete directly with each other. Their ability to retain or expand their enrollment would depend solely on their ability to provide the best package of benefits and the highest quality of care at the most competitive price. The American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the National Center for Policy Analysis, and the Progressive Policy Institute have all endorsed this general approach to comprehensive Medicare reform.

Without reform, Medicare is headed toward a crash landing, leaving America’s seniors in the lurch. Heritage’s Moffit asserts:

Medicare premium support, long a bipartisan proposal, is the best alternative to this unhappy scenario. It would improve the environment for medical practice, guarantee retirees better choices and broader access to quality care, encourage faster innovation in care delivery, and discourage waste and fraud in medical transactions. It would also deliver superior cost control. For the next generation of taxpayers and retirees alike, there is no better future."

 Read full The Foundry article here.