Tuesday, October 23, 2012

More Misinformation from the Obama Campaign

The President’s campaign is releasing a booklet this morning featuring the President’s re-election “plans.”  Unfortunately, many of them involve funny money and fuzzy math.  Take for instance the section on retirement security, which claims that Obamacare “strengthened Medicare by cutting overpayments to insurance companies and cracking down on billions in health care waste, fraud and abuse.  The President added eight years to the Medicare Trust Fund.”

There’s just one problem with these assertions – they aren’t true.  Take the claims about “waste, fraud, and abuse.”  First, Obamacare’s $300 billion in cuts to Medicare Advantage will reduce the program’s enrollment by half and plan choices by two-thirds.  Moreover, the non-partisan Medicare actuary said that Obamacare would have a direct impact on beneficiaries in traditional Medicare as well.  He has concluded that over the long-term, up to 40 percent of providers would become unprofitable due to Obamacare, and could “have to withdraw from providing services to Medicare beneficiaries.”  Earlier this month, an Alabama hospital took a different course – it decided to shut down entirely, due to the impact of Obamacare on its business model.

As to the claims that Obamacare extends the life of the Medicare trust fund, the Congressional Budget Office takes a dim view toward such statements.  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.  If the President 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.

In 2010, President Obama himself admitted in an interview that Obamacare could not rely on double counting, when he stated that “You can’t say that you are saving on Medicare and then spending the money twice.”  The fact that the President is now reversing his own earlier claims shows how badly Obamacare has failed, and how desperate the President is to win re-election.