Countering Right Wing Talking point: "Obama is cutting $716 billion from Medicare"

[Spitfire of ATJ]

You've all heard it. It's repeated as FACT throughout the Right Wing Noise Machine and is accompanied with the "challenge" for Liberals to "defend" it. Then they go on about some "announcement" that payments are being cut and doctors are dropping Medicare patients because they aren't paid enough to stay in business.

It all a lie.

The $716 billion figure is NOT a "CUT".

It's a SAVINGS.

Medicare was paying places for elderly care that had no licensed health care provider available. Some of these placed were large older homes set up almost like the classic "old folks home" and they had NOBODY living there that could provide even basic care. Some were considered a "hospice" that had nobody with even a degree in nursing and yet they were receiving a check every month. Some of them got a HUGE check for having five retirees living in small rooms with no AC and an absentee landlord but ONE tenant might be a retired nurse who gets free or reduced rent. This scam was well known and pervasive especially in the South.

That gravy train came to an end.

Another thing they will claim is "The $716 billion was taken out of Medicare to pay for Obamacare".

This is false too and feeds into a prevailing lie that has been implied that "Obamacare" is free health care for black people. The Right Wing Noise Machine has even said, "Obama is STEALING from Medicare to pay for Obamacare" to enrage their base that the white man is getting ripped off to give the black man free stuff. Back door Reparations.

The truth of the matter is that "Obamacare" is NOT just for black people. It's not even called "Obamacare". It's the Affordable Care Act and it's for EVERYBODY. The $716 billion saved from eliminating the payment of health care to non-heath care providers was put BACK into Medicare to close the "doughnut hole" saving seniors thousands on their prescription drugs.

Just thought you would like to know these facts for the crazy uncle with the steam flying out of his ears.

[SCantiGOP]

1. Here's how I explain it to people

Every year, I'm adding another $1,000 to my credit card debt at the end of the year. I have to get my budget balanced. So, I decide to buy only generic grocery store products and the cheapest brand of ever item. I figure this will save me $500 a year, so I put that in my budget. BUT, I'm still going to buy food all year. If my estimate is off, I still buy the food (or, in the analogy, fund the Medicare program) and I just end up with a slightly larger deficit than planned at the end of the year.
A cut would mean I set a certain amount of money aside for food, and if it runs out at the end of November I just don't eat for December.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

12. Or, another way of putting it...

I went through my bank statements and discovered I had an auto-payment going to a furniture rental company that I never got any furniture from.

[patrice]

2. It's the PATIENT PROTECTION & Affordable Care Act and it includes this RESEARCH tool:

This is NOT an insurance run database and it's not the GOVERNMENT dictating to care recipients. It's a database being built out of input from patients and their care givers, doctors, nurses, family etc. in order to identify best practices not from the insurance companies' perspective, but from the perspective of the results of treatment, that is the OUTCOMES as they are identified by patients/care-givers and families:

http://www.pcori.org/

[Spitfire of ATJ]

11. Links are fine online but a lot of older people don't go online....

....which is why we need words to counter the words they hear on the TV machine.

Believe it or not, there are still a significant number of people out there who think, "they wouldn't allow them to say that on TV if it wasn't true" so we need to deal with THAT as well.

[patrice]

15. Agreed! Certain demographics need different forms of activism, especially elders & the

disabled, because they have high needs which make them extremely much more vulnerable to knee jerk ravings about debt.

Not sure why more is not being made of the PCORI. One would think that as individuals deal with the insurance exchanges created by the PP & ACA, a resource like the PCORI can give them better information about what they might want in their insurance coverage and at what price.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

17. Some of these people just ASSUME "Government" = "Bad"

Case in point:

[img][/img]

[msongs]

3. romney claimed that 10X, Obama refuted it zero times. lie went unchallenged nt

[Spitfire of ATJ]

9. Let's hope that changes in the next two debates.

[meow2u3]

4. Obama cut corporations off welfare to pay for patient protection

The corporate welfare went straight into the bank accounts of the execs.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

8. Makes you wonder how much "incentive" was given to Kaiser.

[Bad Thoughts]

5. Obama SAVED $700 billion ...

... and invested it back into health care.

Ryan took those savings and wanted to give it away.

[patrice]

6. From the blog of Dr. Bill Thomas, an internationally recognized authority on aging:

These are linked in Dr. Thomas' blog:

Elder Abuse: What is It?

http://www.timegoesby.net/weblog/2012/07/elder-abuse-what-is-it.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TimeGoesBy+%28TIME+GOES+BY%29

Elder Abuse: An Institutional Overview

http://www.timegoesby.net/weblog/2012/07/elder-abuse-part-2-institutional-abuse-overview.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TimeGoesBy+%28TIME+GOES+BY%29

Dr. Bill Thomas' blog:

http://changingaging.org/

The Greenhouse Project (for elder/long-term care reform)

http://thegreenhouseproject.org/

[Spitfire of ATJ]

7. Indeed. Neglect is a form of abuse and it's been institutional in America.

[patrice]

13. Elders & the disabled in rural communities have it particularly bad.

As I understand it, practically anyone can own an LTC home. Places, and especially rural places, that do poorly on CMS surveys aren't closed, because residents would literally be in the streets, or back in families' homes causing a great deal of negative effect there.

It's also normal for some of the elderly to pass on, so some level of that is considered acceptable and we should be asking ourselves if it is biologically necessary, or, sorry to say, just a side effect of staffing churn, in fields like nursing in which there is a shortage anyway so they are over-worked, and also not enough CN/MAs and other kids of support staff treated well enough and brought along professionally to deliver authentic person-centered care.

And then there's a practice known as Risk Management that determines from an institutional perspective, rather than from an individual patient/person perspective, what services will be available to what kinds of patients in order to maximize certain other byproducts (e.g. grants and community development stuff) from the flow of those CMS dollars into LTC.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

16. That whole system of "for profit" has come to rely on collecting money and refusing to pay for treat

In the case of elder care it usually hits the kitchen the hardest.

Lots of steam table leftovers that originally was poured out of a huge can and is void of any nutrition. Much of it would be a violation at a school cafeteria and a paid off corrupt local inspector is all it takes to rake in the bucks. The elderly that have no kids visiting and are suffering from dementia are the biggest moneymakers. You not only get the Medicare money but can charge their Social Security for room and board leaving them a $100 a month "allowance" that they are too far gone to spend so you get to pocket that too. Some of these places even charge HUD giving them even more money.

Meanwhile, they rail against "big government" so there's no inspectors to bust them for their business model based ENTIRELY on squeezing every dollar they can out of the government.

[patrice]

19. Correct. I have seen it up close and very personal, for several years and several LTCs. And now

the next generation headed in that direction, the Boomers, just lost a lot of retirement resources in the financial crises that started in '08, so their choices are more limited than they thought.

Time for a change. I'm hoping for more co-operative business models, but not lies of the sort described in OP.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

20. The old game they played isn't going to work and I can tell you why.

The elderly they set up this system for were from the Depression Era and WWII who were used to doing without.

The ones entering the system now are from the 50s and 60s and led middle class lives and are used to getting what they want.

It's the difference between this:

[img][/img]

and this:

[TroyD]

10. Obama should have mentioned this is the exact same number Ryan wants to cut

Bill Clinton called Ryan out on this at the DNC, and yet Obama failed to follow his lead.

That's one of the things that made Chris Matthews & Ed Shultz so upset last night.

Obama can't just let that number sit out there.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

14. It's almost like Obama was afraid to burst the bubble....

....as if the whole game of two truths and two equally valid realities can be decided at the ballot box.

I noticed that in 2004. A vote for Democrats meant Bush lied and a vote for Republicans meant Bush didn't. Conservatives even said America had decided to side with their version od reality in that election. How many times did we hear Right Wingers telling us to shut up about all of that "lie" talk after they won?

[flamingdem]

18. How could Obama have refuted Willard in a quick sound bite?

Maybe that's why he let that one slide

[Spitfire of ATJ]

21. How about, "We SAVED 716 billion and gave it to seniors"?