The 2013 Medicare Trustees Annual Report was recently published, all 280 pages of it. Hoping the average citizen will not take the time to read it, our government has been in Spin heaven.
According to the government, every thing is just peachy keen – they were wrong – the fake “trust fund” will last much longer than we were originally told, based in part on Obama’s attempt to install a nationwide Socialist health care scheme, loving known to the public as ObamaCare.
To begin with, the Annual report is based on assumptions that the Medicare actuaries actually called “clearly unrealistic”. If they are unrealistic to the actuaries, you can bet things are not as rosy as Obama would have us believe.
The unfunded Medicare liability, according to the Trustees, is $34 trillion over the next 75 years. They further predict that looking into the indefinite future, the unfunded liability is only $43 trillion – which is almost three times the size of the economy! You don’t see any problem there? The Congressional Budget Office however, predicts a more plausible shortfall of $100 trillion.
The Trustees are basing their “unrealistic assumption” that Congress will cut Medicare fees payable to doctors by 25%. How realistic is it to expect Congress to make the cuts?
In 1997, Congress passed The Balanced Budget Act dictating that Medicare physician fees would not grow any faster than the economy as a whole. Since its passage, Congress, has chosen to ignore their law and has over-ridden the cuts, every time.
On the whole, Congress painted themselves into a corner. Financially, had the cuts been allowed to take place, part of the problem with the “fake” Medicare “trust fund” would have been solved. But, allowing the cuts to take place would have meant that a large number of doctors and hospitals accepting Medicare patients would have dropped those Medicare patients and a large number of incumbents would have lost their jobs.
Another problem with the actuaries’ assumptions deals with the disaster we call ObamaCare. In order to pay for the Socialist takeover, ObamaCare cuts Medicare spending to finance the coverage for the uninsured.
While actual Medicare spending has been growing at about the rate of real GDP per person plus two percentage points, ObamaCare calls for a growth rate of only 0.04% which, over the next ten years, will cut $716 from Medicare payouts. If that isn’t bad enough – ObamaCare mandates this slower growth rate forever.
If Congress refuses to cut provider fees, the unfunded liabilities in Medicare will grow at twice the rate the actuaries predicted, much closer to the rate predicted by the CBO. If however, Congress cuts Medicare fees to service providers, where does that leave Seniors?
Chris Conover at Forbes says that cuts will be so severe by 2030 that doctors will be receiving 60% less through Medicare than they will receive from private health insurance and one-third less than Medicaid pays. By 2040, ObamaCare mandated cuts to hospitals will require them to receive only half of what they would receive from private health insurance.
Such cuts portend huge problems in access for Medicare and Medicaid patients, either because providers will refuse to treat them or because facilities will literally have been driven to bankruptcy.
Looking at the “big” picture, perhaps that is the whole idea of the globalist “eugenic” progressive crowd. When you allow (mandate) the death of the old, the disabled, the poor, there will be more for the “elite” to divvy up.
Source: John C. Goodman, president of National Center for Policy Analysis
