Friday, April 13, 2012

I Thought Health “Reform” WAS Entitlement Reform…

The President just said “we have to reform Medicare to strengthen it.”  That’s an interesting assertion, seeing as how his Administration previously argued for more than a year that “health care reform is entitlement reform.”  So in now stating that Medicare needs further reform, the President is admitting that his reform failed to achieve its stated objective.

The fact is that Obamacare made Medicare’s fiscal situation WORSE, because non-partisan budget analysts have admitted that the health care law uses more than $500 billion in Medicare funds to pay for new entitlements – provisions that do NOT improve Medicare’s solvency.  For instance, Medicare actuary Richard Foster has written that the Medicare provisions in Obamacare “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.”   And the Congressional Budget Office has written that the Medicare provisions in Obamacare “would not enhance the ability of the government to pay for future Medicare benefits.”

Speaker Pelosi famously said we had to pass the bill to find out what’s in it.  Perhaps Democrats have finally taken her advice, to discover how Obamacare uses more than half a trillion dollars in Medicare savings – not to improve Medicare’s fiscal situation, but to create new and unsustainable entitlements.