The Affordable Care Act and Medicare
Talking Points Memo has a good post on the New England Journal of Medicine?s new report on slowing the cost growth in Medicare spending. NEJM asks, ?Slower Growth in Medicare Spending ? Is This the New Normal??
?On the whole, we do not believe that the recent slowdown in Medicare spending growth is a fluke,? wrote the researchers Chapin White and Paul Ginsburg. Thanks to the cost-control reforms over the last decade, they added, ?the CBO projects that over the next decade Medicare spending per enrollee will grow substantially more slowly than the overall economy.? They argued that the ACA in particular lays the framework for longer term cost-control by transitioning the provider reimbursement system from paying for quantity to paying for quality, something even Republicans quietly believe is a good idea.?
TPM also writes:
?If the cost-growth slowdown continues into the foreseeable future, it could have dramatic implications on the future of health care policy.The conservative movement has disliked Medicare ever since its inception in the early 1960s, when Ronald Reagan argued it would spell the end of freedom in America. Half a century after enactment, Republicans have found a potent pretext to dismantle the senior safety-net program: impending fiscal doom. Indeed, official projections in recent years have found that Medicare spending is on course to swallow the entire federal budget in half a century. And that has been the central justification for the GOP?s plan, written by Rep. Paul Ryan, to phase out traditional Medicare and replace it with a subsidized private insurance system.But if the NEJM projections hold, the threat of fiscal catastrophe would lose steam. And that means Republicans would have to resort to ideological arguments against Medicare if they want to end its basic structure ? a hard sell given the program?s immense popularity. Prior efforts to dramatically scale back Medicare benefits have fallen flat, and without being able to portray privatization or ?premium support? as critical to avoiding fiscal apocalypse, as Ryan does on a regular basis, there?s no reason to expect a different outcome.?
What this piece doesn?t mention is the fact that not only has healthcare reform slowed cost growth, it also uses some of those savings to provide new benefits for seniors — a fact never discussed by conservatives who want the Affordable Care Act repealed before seniors even realize these new benefits exist.The Patients Aware campaign has launched a nationwide campaign to cut through all this political rhetoric on Medicare. You can check it out at
www. patientsaware.org
Did You Know? – Busting Medicare/Healthcare Myths
Confused by what health care reform really means for seniors? Join the crowd. Take a few minutes and let this video help break it all down for you…The Patients Aware campaign, created by the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare Foundation, the Herndon Alliance, and the National Physicians Alliance, has released a new video to help America?s seniors understand the new Medicare benefits available to them thanks to the Affordable Care Act. The video, ?Did You Know??, highlights new preventive benefits for seniors, Part D coverage improvements like closing the donut hole, and describes how savings have already reduced Part B premiums for seniors. The video can be seen on the Patients Aware website at: www. Patientsaware.org. Patients Aware has assembled a national network of doctors, nurses, and other healthcare experts to give Medicare presentations during educational meetings and town halls beginning in March. Medical professionals are among the most trusted sources of health care information for seniors and their families. They understand how vital Medicare is to the health and wellbeing of their older patients which is why they have agreed to donate their free time to provide information and answer questions for seniors in cities throughout the country.?America?s seniors want and deserve the facts about Medicare, prescription drug policy, and what federal health reform will mean for them. Most Americans know very little about the important new benefits and protections provided by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The National Physicians Alliance has found that providing non-partisan, factual information about the law is the best antidote to widespread confusion and anxiety.? Dr. Valerie Arkoosh, NPA PresidentThe video release and town hall tour follows a successful December 2011 campaign kick off in which more than sixty thousand Americans participated in a Patients Aware tele-town hall with Assistant Secretary for Aging Kathy Greenlee, and a panel of doctors, nurses, and healthcare policy experts. Seniors and their families dialed in to this national forum to ask questions about the Affordable Care Act and what it means for millions of Medicare beneficiaries. The hour-long event kicked-off one of the most effective education efforts to date since the law was passed in March 2010.
Telling the WHOLE Medicare Story
While Presidential candidates and Washington politicians continue to claim ?we can?t afford Social Security and Medicare?, few– if any–want to talk about what their proposals will actually mean for millions of middle-class Americans who depend on these programs. Columbia Journalism Review?s Trudy Lieberman wrote a memo to political journalists urging them to start asking some tough questions so that voters can understand what their plans to cut benefits will actually mean for our nation.
Last week, speaking to business leaders in Detroit, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney mentioned that Medicare-eligible Americans ought to wait longer for their benefits. The media glossed over Romney?s remarks; but I kept thinking about them as I was chatting with a woman who had one leg, amputated because of complications from diabetes. And they stayed in my mind as I talked to another woman?a 67-year-old who had a stroke last year, and had had to quit working as a presser for a local dry cleaner ten years ago, when she was 57. She had a seizure, and a hot press fell on her hand. A long scar shows how her work life ended. She qualified for a Social Security disability check?all of $795 a month that?s been her only income ever since. How on earth could someone like her pay for medical care if she had had to wait a few more years?A CNBC blog picked up an AP story which noted that Mitt had said the federal health reform law was too expensive; that it raised taxes and cut $500 billion from Medicare. Not another half truth! For the fourteenth time, the law did cut payments to hospitals and to sellers of Medicare Advantage plans, but it did not cut basic benefits for seniors. Yet the GOP keeps using the number to scare seniors into voting for them. The blog post linked to a CNBC primer on Medicare and Medicaid, which at least offered some basics. For the record, the CNBC primer didn?t correct that misperception. Please indulge me in a digression. Research from respected sources like the Kaiser Family Foundation has challenged the notion that raising the age for Medicare benefits saves money. Kaiser found that lifting the age from 65 to 67 would reduce Medicare spending by $7.6 billion. But before you run with that number, you need to know that cost would merely be shifted to employers and individuals, who would have to pay more for health coverage to replace the lost Medicare benefits. It would mean spending $10.1 billion in the private sector to save $7.6 billion for the government. How?s that for bending the nation?s cost curve?
You can see the Kaiser Family Foundation report here. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities also looked the costs of raising Medicare?s eligibility age here.
Chained CPI Doesn’t Cut It
Normally we see eye to eye with the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities on Social Security and Medicare policy. However, we respectfully disagree with their recent position that the Chained CPI formula should be used to calculate Cost of Living Adjustments for Social Security recipients as part of a larger deficit reduction package.The Chained CPI is a benefit cut for Social Security beneficiaries, plain and simple. Since Social Security did notcause this deficit, why should we askbeneficiaries to pay for it through benefit cuts? This makes no sense and further emboldens anti-entitlement crusaders who have been desperately trying to cut Social Security for decades. 
As CBPP itself has reported, there are other drivers of our deficit and those should be the focus of any debt debate. Cutting Social Security benefits by adopting the chained CPI is not the way to go if we want to protect the future financial stability of seniors.The Chained CPI cuts benefits because it produces lower estimates of inflation than the current CPI does, averaging about 0.3 percentage points lower than the increases in the current CPI since December 2000. The Chief Actuary estimates this reduced COLA would mean a benefit cut of about $130 per year (0.9 percent) for a typical 65 year-old. By the time that senior reaches 95, the annual benefit cut will be almost $1400, a 9.2 percent reduction from currently scheduled benefits. Social Security?s oldest beneficiaries will suffer the most under this formula while younger beneficiaries, who may have sources of income other than Social Security, could find themselves hit from another direction as well – increased taxes.We should not cut Social Security in the name of deficit reduction, period. If lawmakers want to strengthen Social Security?s benefits and improve the program?s long-term solvency, this should be accomplished solely from the perspective of what is best for this self-financed social insurance program. The Chained CPI is nothing more than a way to cut benefits that proponents hope will fly under the political radar so that beneficiaries won?t understand what?s happened to their benefits until it?s too late.
Santorum Describes Social Security & Medicare Beneficiaries as Drug Addicts Needing a “Dime Bag”
As we have said before, it?s long past time that primary voters start asking Presidential candidates very specific questions about their plans for Social Security and Medicare. So far, voters have been treated to a lot of Orwellian double-speak offered by candidates who say “reform” when they mean “cut” and “preserve” when they mean “privatize.”While GOP Presidential candidate Rick Santorum has made his views on Social Security and Medicare clearer than most–he wants to slash both– we found a video this week that offers a terrifying view of what Santorum really thinks about America?s seniors, the disabled, survivors and their families. He sees them as nothing more than drug addicts.In a 2010 speech at the Pennsylvania Republican State Committee’s annual dinner Santorum, in tones of hushed drama and fake theatrics, describes Democrats who support programs like Social Security and Medicare (including the President of the United States) as drug dealers pushing ?dime bags? to addicts — who in his worldview include middle class Americans who have the nerve to expect to collect the benefits they?ve paid for.Here?s the video followed by the full transcript.?I?ll tell you what Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama are telling me. What they?re telling me is that you may not like it now but Americans love their entitlements. And once we get you hooked on the entitlement you?ll never go back. Now I closed my eyes and thought, I?m standing in front of the school yard with a guy and a dime bag saying once I hook you, once I numb you, once I stop you from reaching great heights and protect you from falling?we got you. We?ll hook you.? former Senator Rick Santorum Shame on Rick Santorum. Political rhetoric is one thing but equating millions of hard-working Americans with drug addicts is indefensible and ridiculous. It?s also provides a frightening glimpse of his world-view, if he were elected President.
The Affordable Care Act and Medicare
Talking Points Memo has a good post on the New England Journal of Medicine?s new report on slowing the cost growth in Medicare spending. NEJM asks, ?Slower Growth in Medicare Spending ? Is This the New Normal??
?On the whole, we do not believe that the recent slowdown in Medicare spending growth is a fluke,? wrote the researchers Chapin White and Paul Ginsburg. Thanks to the cost-control reforms over the last decade, they added, ?the CBO projects that over the next decade Medicare spending per enrollee will grow substantially more slowly than the overall economy.? They argued that the ACA in particular lays the framework for longer term cost-control by transitioning the provider reimbursement system from paying for quantity to paying for quality, something even Republicans quietly believe is a good idea.?
TPM also writes:
?If the cost-growth slowdown continues into the foreseeable future, it could have dramatic implications on the future of health care policy.The conservative movement has disliked Medicare ever since its inception in the early 1960s, when Ronald Reagan argued it would spell the end of freedom in America. Half a century after enactment, Republicans have found a potent pretext to dismantle the senior safety-net program: impending fiscal doom. Indeed, official projections in recent years have found that Medicare spending is on course to swallow the entire federal budget in half a century. And that has been the central justification for the GOP?s plan, written by Rep. Paul Ryan, to phase out traditional Medicare and replace it with a subsidized private insurance system.But if the NEJM projections hold, the threat of fiscal catastrophe would lose steam. And that means Republicans would have to resort to ideological arguments against Medicare if they want to end its basic structure ? a hard sell given the program?s immense popularity. Prior efforts to dramatically scale back Medicare benefits have fallen flat, and without being able to portray privatization or ?premium support? as critical to avoiding fiscal apocalypse, as Ryan does on a regular basis, there?s no reason to expect a different outcome.?
What this piece doesn?t mention is the fact that not only has healthcare reform slowed cost growth, it also uses some of those savings to provide new benefits for seniors — a fact never discussed by conservatives who want the Affordable Care Act repealed before seniors even realize these new benefits exist.The Patients Aware campaign has launched a nationwide campaign to cut through all this political rhetoric on Medicare. You can check it out at
www. patientsaware.org
Did You Know? – Busting Medicare/Healthcare Myths
Confused by what health care reform really means for seniors? Join the crowd. Take a few minutes and let this video help break it all down for you…The Patients Aware campaign, created by the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare Foundation, the Herndon Alliance, and the National Physicians Alliance, has released a new video to help America?s seniors understand the new Medicare benefits available to them thanks to the Affordable Care Act. The video, ?Did You Know??, highlights new preventive benefits for seniors, Part D coverage improvements like closing the donut hole, and describes how savings have already reduced Part B premiums for seniors. The video can be seen on the Patients Aware website at: www. Patientsaware.org. Patients Aware has assembled a national network of doctors, nurses, and other healthcare experts to give Medicare presentations during educational meetings and town halls beginning in March. Medical professionals are among the most trusted sources of health care information for seniors and their families. They understand how vital Medicare is to the health and wellbeing of their older patients which is why they have agreed to donate their free time to provide information and answer questions for seniors in cities throughout the country.?America?s seniors want and deserve the facts about Medicare, prescription drug policy, and what federal health reform will mean for them. Most Americans know very little about the important new benefits and protections provided by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The National Physicians Alliance has found that providing non-partisan, factual information about the law is the best antidote to widespread confusion and anxiety.? Dr. Valerie Arkoosh, NPA PresidentThe video release and town hall tour follows a successful December 2011 campaign kick off in which more than sixty thousand Americans participated in a Patients Aware tele-town hall with Assistant Secretary for Aging Kathy Greenlee, and a panel of doctors, nurses, and healthcare policy experts. Seniors and their families dialed in to this national forum to ask questions about the Affordable Care Act and what it means for millions of Medicare beneficiaries. The hour-long event kicked-off one of the most effective education efforts to date since the law was passed in March 2010.
Telling the WHOLE Medicare Story
While Presidential candidates and Washington politicians continue to claim ?we can?t afford Social Security and Medicare?, few– if any–want to talk about what their proposals will actually mean for millions of middle-class Americans who depend on these programs. Columbia Journalism Review?s Trudy Lieberman wrote a memo to political journalists urging them to start asking some tough questions so that voters can understand what their plans to cut benefits will actually mean for our nation.
Last week, speaking to business leaders in Detroit, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney mentioned that Medicare-eligible Americans ought to wait longer for their benefits. The media glossed over Romney?s remarks; but I kept thinking about them as I was chatting with a woman who had one leg, amputated because of complications from diabetes. And they stayed in my mind as I talked to another woman?a 67-year-old who had a stroke last year, and had had to quit working as a presser for a local dry cleaner ten years ago, when she was 57. She had a seizure, and a hot press fell on her hand. A long scar shows how her work life ended. She qualified for a Social Security disability check?all of $795 a month that?s been her only income ever since. How on earth could someone like her pay for medical care if she had had to wait a few more years?A CNBC blog picked up an AP story which noted that Mitt had said the federal health reform law was too expensive; that it raised taxes and cut $500 billion from Medicare. Not another half truth! For the fourteenth time, the law did cut payments to hospitals and to sellers of Medicare Advantage plans, but it did not cut basic benefits for seniors. Yet the GOP keeps using the number to scare seniors into voting for them. The blog post linked to a CNBC primer on Medicare and Medicaid, which at least offered some basics. For the record, the CNBC primer didn?t correct that misperception. Please indulge me in a digression. Research from respected sources like the Kaiser Family Foundation has challenged the notion that raising the age for Medicare benefits saves money. Kaiser found that lifting the age from 65 to 67 would reduce Medicare spending by $7.6 billion. But before you run with that number, you need to know that cost would merely be shifted to employers and individuals, who would have to pay more for health coverage to replace the lost Medicare benefits. It would mean spending $10.1 billion in the private sector to save $7.6 billion for the government. How?s that for bending the nation?s cost curve?
You can see the Kaiser Family Foundation report here. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities also looked the costs of raising Medicare?s eligibility age here.
Chained CPI Doesn’t Cut It
Normally we see eye to eye with the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities on Social Security and Medicare policy. However, we respectfully disagree with their recent position that the Chained CPI formula should be used to calculate Cost of Living Adjustments for Social Security recipients as part of a larger deficit reduction package.The Chained CPI is a benefit cut for Social Security beneficiaries, plain and simple. Since Social Security did notcause this deficit, why should we askbeneficiaries to pay for it through benefit cuts? This makes no sense and further emboldens anti-entitlement crusaders who have been desperately trying to cut Social Security for decades. As CBPP itself has reported, there are other drivers of our deficit and those should be the focus of any debt debate. Cutting Social Security benefits by adopting the chained CPI is not the way to go if we want to protect the future financial stability of seniors.The Chained CPI cuts benefits because it produces lower estimates of inflation than the current CPI does, averaging about 0.3 percentage points lower than the increases in the current CPI since December 2000. The Chief Actuary estimates this reduced COLA would mean a benefit cut of about $130 per year (0.9 percent) for a typical 65 year-old. By the time that senior reaches 95, the annual benefit cut will be almost $1400, a 9.2 percent reduction from currently scheduled benefits. Social Security?s oldest beneficiaries will suffer the most under this formula while younger beneficiaries, who may have sources of income other than Social Security, could find themselves hit from another direction as well – increased taxes.We should not cut Social Security in the name of deficit reduction, period. If lawmakers want to strengthen Social Security?s benefits and improve the program?s long-term solvency, this should be accomplished solely from the perspective of what is best for this self-financed social insurance program. The Chained CPI is nothing more than a way to cut benefits that proponents hope will fly under the political radar so that beneficiaries won?t understand what?s happened to their benefits until it?s too late.
Santorum Describes Social Security & Medicare Beneficiaries as Drug Addicts Needing a “Dime Bag”
As we have said before, it?s long past time that primary voters start asking Presidential candidates very specific questions about their plans for Social Security and Medicare. So far, voters have been treated to a lot of Orwellian double-speak offered by candidates who say “reform” when they mean “cut” and “preserve” when they mean “privatize.”While GOP Presidential candidate Rick Santorum has made his views on Social Security and Medicare clearer than most–he wants to slash both– we found a video this week that offers a terrifying view of what Santorum really thinks about America?s seniors, the disabled, survivors and their families. He sees them as nothing more than drug addicts.In a 2010 speech at the Pennsylvania Republican State Committee’s annual dinner Santorum, in tones of hushed drama and fake theatrics, describes Democrats who support programs like Social Security and Medicare (including the President of the United States) as drug dealers pushing ?dime bags? to addicts — who in his worldview include middle class Americans who have the nerve to expect to collect the benefits they?ve paid for.Here?s the video followed by the full transcript.?I?ll tell you what Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama are telling me. What they?re telling me is that you may not like it now but Americans love their entitlements. And once we get you hooked on the entitlement you?ll never go back. Now I closed my eyes and thought, I?m standing in front of the school yard with a guy and a dime bag saying once I hook you, once I numb you, once I stop you from reaching great heights and protect you from falling?we got you. We?ll hook you.? former Senator Rick Santorum Shame on Rick Santorum. Political rhetoric is one thing but equating millions of hard-working Americans with drug addicts is indefensible and ridiculous. It?s also provides a frightening glimpse of his world-view, if he were elected President.