President Obama cut $716B from Medicare - Higher death rates, fewer providers, higher premiums and co-payments
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- Created on Friday, 12 October 2012 22:30
- Written by AMAC
Bohemia, New York - "President Obama continues to weave his way through explanations of how he 'saved,' not 'cut,' $716 billion in Medicare funding," according to Dan Weber, president of the Association of Mature American Citizens.
Weber contended that the president's mega-savings derive from significantly reduced reimbursements to health care providers. "In other words, he slashed program funding for services, thus ensuring that fewer doctors and fewer medical institutions will be willing to accept Medicare patients in the near-term and long-term future."
The Chief Actuary for Medicare, Richard Foster, has confirmed that there will be fewer health care options for older Americans going forward as a result of the president's Medicare cuts. In addition, he explained to Congress that those providers who continue to accept Medicare won't have the time to do certain procedures.
Weber pointed out that when Medicare cut payments to hospitals in the past, it resulted in higher death rates.
"The National Bureau of Economic Research even quantified that morbid, little fact. The NBER calculated that when the government cut $1,000 from what a hospital usually spent on an elderly heart-attack patient, the overall death rate for seniors with heart conditions went up as much as eight percent."
The bottom line is that seniors will find themselves in ever more dire circumstances as ObamaCare continues to eat into the funding and the efficacy of Medicare. "Death rates will go up, the elderly will find it harder to find health care services and they will face higher Medicare premiums and co-payments," Weber explained.
So why would the president cut Medicare funding? To pay for costly provisions of ObamaCare, the AMAC chief said.
"Bear in mind that Medicare is not an entitlement program. We paid premiums all our working lives in order to have this health care insurance when we got older. Now the president is diverting those premiums to help finance new, freebie entitlement programs."