Obama’s Medicare Abdication: 808 Days and Counting…
That’s how long it’s been since President Obama was first required by law to submit legislation remedying Medicare’s funding shortfalls. As we previously reported, existing law requires that when the Medicare trustees certify a Medicare funding warning (as they have in every year since 2007), the President has a statutory requirement to propose legislation to Congress within 15 days to remedy the shortfall. President Obama’s first complete budget* was submitted on May 7, 2009, meaning the requirement to submit Medicare reform legislation kicked in on May 22, 2009 – 808 days ago.
In that entire time frame, President Obama has submitted ZERO bills to Congress to fix Medicare’s fiscal shortfalls, statutory requirements notwithstanding. Worse yet, the President signed into law a measure (i.e., Obamacare) that diverted more than $500 billion in Medicare savings – not to ensure the solvency of the Medicare program, but to create more new and unsustainable entitlements. The Congressional Budget Office noted that the Medicare provisions in Obamacare “would not enhance the ability of the government to pay for future Medicare benefits.”
The President claimed in his speech yesterday that he intends to submit his own recommendations to the Congressional “Super Committee” regarding deficit reduction – and perhaps, just perhaps, regarding entitlement reform as well. However, seeing as how he has willfully disregarded his statutory requirement to submit solutions to Medicare’s problems for over two years – and used the Medicare program as a “piggy bank” to fund Obamacare’s massive new entitlements – many, warily eyeing the President’s apparent Damascene conversion to the cause of entitlement reform, may ask: What took you so long? And how does waiting more than 800 days to fulfill statutory requirements designed to ensure Medicare’s solvency constitute Presidential leadership?
* As most newly inaugurated executives do, President Obama submitted his 2009 budget request in two parts – a summary document released in February, and a complete version of documents, which was released on May 7, 2009. Using the later date results in the most generous interpretation possible of the President’s abdication of leadership regarding this issue. However, the President also said yesterday it was “true the day I took office” that the United States needed to embark on deficit reduction. For the record, it is now 930 days since President Obama took office.