The President’s claim that, “If like your health insurance plan, you will be able to keep it” definitely doesn’t apply to seniors, says an article in today’s Wall Street Journal.
Peter Ferrara, author of The ObamaCare Disaster, and Larry Hunter, president of the Social Security Institute, argue that attacks in the fall campaigns about the GOP wanting to “gut” Medicare are silly—the administration health care plan has already done that:
In his analysis accompanying the recently released Annual Report of the Medicare Board of Trustees, Richard Foster, Medicare's chief actuary, noted that Medicare payment rates for doctors and hospitals serving seniors will be cut by 30% over the next three years. Under the policies of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, by 2019 Medicare payment rates will be lower than under Medicaid. Mr. Foster notes that by the end of the 75-year projection period in the Annual Medicare Trustees Report, Medicare payment rates will be one-third of what will be paid by private insurance, and only half of what is paid by Medicaid. …
These draconian cuts in Medicare payments to doctors, hospitals and other health-care providers that serve America's seniors were the basis for the Congressional Budget Office's official "score"—repeatedly cited by the president—that the health-reform legislation would actually reduce the federal deficit. But Mr. Obama never disclosed how that deficit reduction would actually be achieved.
The article is well worth reading.
Another good article:
Dr. Saul Greenfield is director of pediatric urology at the Women and Children's Hospital of Buffalo and a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. As a young doctor, he was told, “You can’t practice medicine by committee.” But that is exactly what our new health care system mandates.
Read Dr. Greenfield’s article in defense of physician autonomy in the Wall Street Journal.