No. David Cutler hails the success of ObamaCare. It's a success, he says, because it is slowing the increase in Medicare costs.
The Affordable Care Act is a key to the underlying change. Starting in 2010, the ACA lowered the annual increases that Medicare pays to hospitals, home health agencies and private insurance plans. Together, these account for 5 percent of the post-2010 cost slowdown. Medicare payment changes always provoke fears — in this case, that private plans would flee the program and that the quality of care in hospitals would suffer. Neither of these fears has materialized, however. Enrollment in private plans is up since the ACA changes.
In reality, ObamaCare is simply a refusal to pay for Medicare services.
Despite the constant political rhetoric that Medicare payment reductions affect only providers and not beneficiaries, funding cuts for Medicare services will directly affect those who depend on those services. If Obamacare’s major reductions are implemented by Congress over the coming decade, seniors’ ability to access Medicare services will surely diminish. In fact, the Medicare Trustees project that the lower Medicare payment rates would cause 15 percent of hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, and home health agencies to become unprofitable by 2019, and this percentage would reach roughly 25 percent in 2030 and 40 percent by 2050.[2]
This means that seniors would have an increasingly difficult time accessing care. As the Trustees explain:
Medicare’s payments for health services would fall increasingly below providers’ costs. Providers could not sustain continuing negative margins and would have to withdraw from serving Medicare beneficiaries or (if total facility margins remained positive) shift substantial portions of Medicare costs to their non-Medicare, non-Medicaid payers.[3]Fewer Plan Choices
In addition to the provider payment reductions, Obamacare significantly reduces payments to Medicare Advantage (MA) plans by an estimated $156 billion from 2013 to 2022.[4] About 27 percent of all Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled in MA plans, a system of regulated and private plans competing against each other as an alternative to traditional Medicare. MA plans are attractive to beneficiaries because they offer more generous and comprehensive coverage than traditional Medicare by capping out-of-pocket costs and offering drug coverage.
This claim that healthcare costs are being contained is nonsense, but the administration really has no choice. They simply can't stop lying about ObamaCare and expect it to survive. But this brings us to the cost of administration lies. Andrew McCarthy writes that a CEO who deceives consumers as Obama has deceived the American people would be guilty of a serious federal felony.
‘If you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan. Period.” How serious was this lie, repeated by Barack Obama with such beguiling regularity? Well, how would the Justice Department be dealing with it if it had been uttered by, say, the president of an insurance company rather than the president of the United States?
Fraud is a serious federal felony, usually punishable by up to 20 years’ imprisonment — with every repetition of a fraudulent communication chargeable as a separate crime. In computing sentences, federal sentencing guidelines factor in such considerations as the dollar value of the fraud, the number of victims, and the degree to which the offender’s treachery breaches any special fiduciary duties he owes. Cases of multi-million-dollar corporate frauds — to say nothing of multi-billion-dollar, Bernie Madoff–level scams that nevertheless pale beside Obamacare’s dimensions — often result in terms amounting to decades in the slammer.
It doesn't matter that Obama's fraud can be proven. It's an inescapable fact. There is just no chance that Obama will be impeached, prosecuted, or in any way made to pay a penalty for what under the laws that the rest of us live under would be a federal crime. Laws are not for Obama, or the rest of the ruling class for that matter.
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