David Plouffe on Medicare
Speaking on ABC’s This Week Sunday, Obama Administration adviser David Plouffe made a series of false and misleading comments about Medicare. It’s worth unpacking them one by one.
“The president’s approach to Medicare…extended Medicare solvency for eight years…” That’s not what the Congressional Budget Office said. The non-partisan CBO said that the Medicare reductions in Obamacare “will not enhance the ability of the government to pay for future Medicare benefits” – because those savings will be used to fund other unsustainable entitlements. Even President Obama himself admitted this irrefutable logic in a 2010 interview, when he stated that “You can’t say that you are saving on Medicare and then spending the money twice.”
“…which was supported by AARP…” As a House Ways and Means member report last year showed, AARP stands to benefit by over $1 billion, thanks to the numerous exemptions included in Obamacare for AARP’s lucrative Medigap insurance policies – making AARP far from a neutral arbiter in the Obamacare debate.
“The savings all came from waste and fraud and subsidies that shouldn’t have been going to the insurance companies…” Administration rhetoric notwithstanding, these reductions will have a measurable impact on many Medicare beneficiaries. First, Obamacare’s cuts to Medicare Advantage will reduce that program’s enrollment by half and cut plan choices by two-thirds – undermining the President’s promise that those who like their plan will be able to keep it under Obamacare. Second, both the Medicare actuary and the Congressional Budget Office have concluded that some of the law’s biggest Medicare reductions will not be sustainable in the long-term; the Medicare actuary said the reductions could cause up to 40 percent of hospitals to become unprofitable – at which point they may have to stop treating Medicare patients.
“Not a dime came from Medicare beneficiaries.” That statement is flat-out FALSE. The President HAS enacted cuts to Medicare benefits – namely, additional means-testing in Obamacare. And in his budget submitted to Congress this spring, the President proposed additional cuts in benefits – cuts that would (conveniently) take effect only after he leaves office. As we previously wrote, many of these benefit cuts (both enacted and proposed) make sense from a policy perspective – but that does NOT give the Administration the right to claim they haven’t proposed cutting Medicare benefits, when in reality they have already enacted benefit cuts.
“The suggestion that we’re raiding Medicare, absolutely untrue.” Nancy Pelosi thinks otherwise. Last November, she admitted that Democrats “took a half a trillion dollars out of Medicare in [Obamacare], the health care bill” to pay for more federal spending.
Looked at as a whole, there is a larger irony in Plouffe’s comments, and that’s this: For all the talk of “Mediscare” tactics by Democrats around premium support or other comprehensive entitlement reforms, the largest batch of misinformation from the Left has involved what Obamacare does and doesn’t do for seniors. The fact that Democrats can’t even admit the true facts behind their unpopular 2700-page health care law is as good an argument as any for why they should not be trusted to enact the reforms necessary to strengthen and preserve the Medicare program.