Republicans set new lower bar for Demagoguery - USA Today

[JohnWxy]

The Corporate Lobbyist Party continues it's mastery of the dark arts of demagoguery and disinformation with their latest claims in Senate debate of HCR that the Democrats are trying to see that grandma "dies sooner" with the cuts to Medicare which the AARP supports!

The cuts by the way, are in part due to Hospitals accepting lower Medicare payments as they will be getting more insured patients (thanks to HCR) and fewer uninsured patients (which the Government pays millions for now - its called the Disproportionate Share Hospital payments program - these costs will go down as there will be fewer uninsured patients walking into hospitals for treatment). The rest of the cuts are to the gold-plated Medicare Advantage program - which subsidizes for-profit insurers to cover medicare eligible individuals.




http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2009/12/debate-on-medical-reform-our-view-gop-revives-scare-grandma-tactics-to-kill-health-bill.html


The occasion for this and other over-the-top rhetoric was an effort by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., to remove the nearly $500 billion in Medicare cuts from the Senate measure. McCain argues that the cuts are so big, they'll inevitably and unfairly harm seniors' health care.

Tellingly, even the nation's leading advocacy group for the aging, AARP, opposes McCain's amendment, noting that the Senate plan "does not reduce any guaranteed Medicare benefits." It's also interesting to note that McCain and other Republicans haven't always felt so protective of Grandma. McCain suggested even larger Medicare cuts during his presidential campaign last year, and he and some other GOP critics voted for cuts more than twice as big when Congress approved the Balanced Budget Act in 1997.

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Critics charge that Medicare providers such as hospitals - which would be cut about $140 billion over 10 years -- would have to scale back services to seniors. It's odd, then, that the hospitals themselves agreed to accept about $155 billion in cuts. Why? Because health reform would provide so many new patients with insurance — including many that hospitals now treat for free - that hospitals would come out ahead.

Another big cut would come from Medicare Advantage, or so-called private Medicare, which was created to show that businesses could run Medicare plans more efficiently than the government. Few succeeded, so Congress made the program richer.

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McCain suggested even bigger cuts to Medicare during his campaign last year. This is nothing but another ploy to sabotage HCR.

[damntexdem]

1. Medicare Advantage should be terminated, certainly the payments cut.

I still worry about the cuts to hospitals.

[Frances]

2. I think that Medicare Advantage

should be removed; it costs 14% more than regular medicare and is a waste of taxpayer money. I think the Repubs added it to medicare for two reasons (1) enrich insurance companies so that the insurance companies would give more money to the Repubs and (2) to use Medicare Advantage as an excuse to eliminate Medicare; they couldn't succeed in eliminating medicare directly