Fact Checking Nancy Pelosi on…Everything
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appeared on Face the Nation yesterday, and made several allegations regarding Medicare that warrant rebuttal:
CLAIM: “I could never support any arrangement that reduces benefits from Medicare.”
FACT: The status quo WILL reduce benefits in Medicare, when the paper IOUs in the Medicare trust fund are exhausted in as few as nine years, leaving the program short of funds to pay its bills. While Pelosi claims to oppose cutting Medicare benefits, if we do nothing, those benefits to seniors will automatically be reduced.
CLAIM: “We in our health care bill…saved half a trillion dollars in Medicare. We had half a trillion dollars in savings there which…we made it [the Medicare trust fund] stable for about ten years…added ten years of solvency into the future.”
FACT: The Medicare actuary has previously written that the Medicare provisions in the law “cannot be simultaneously used to finance other Federal outlays (such as the coverage expansions under the PPACA) and to extend the [Medicare] trust fund, despite the appearance of this result from the respective accounting conventions.” If Pelosi wants to use the Medicare savings provisions to extend the life of the Medicare trust fund – and not to fund the new entitlements created by the law – the Congressional Budget Office previously estimated what the fiscal impact would be: “A net increase in federal deficits of $260 billion” through 2019.
CLAIM: “I think that we can…give the secretary of HHS the power to renegotiate for lower prices. That would save billions and billions and billions of dollars….If you’re talking about reducing the benefits, that’s a non-starter.”
FACT: The Congressional Budget Office has previously asserted that giving HHS such a power to negotiate drug prices “would have a negligible effect on federal spending….Without the authority to establish a [drug] formulary, we believe that the Secretary [of HHS]…would lack the leverage to obtain significant discounts in [her] negotiations with drug manufacturers.” The only way for the federal government to save “billions and billions and billions of dollars” through drug negotiation, as Pelosi claims, would be to establish a formulary that prohibits Medicare from covering certain prescription drugs – in other words, by cutting Medicare benefits.
While former Speaker Pelosi says she doesn’t want to reduce Medicare benefits to seniors, doing nothing would result in seniors losing Medicare benefits – as would her one proposed “solution” involving prescription drug negotiation. These comments perfectly illustrate how Democrats’ “Mediscare” arguments fail – and why Congress needs to develop a true long-term solution to America’s entitlement crisis.