The Democrats want to cut Medicare by $465 billion under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act plus add millions of Americans aged 55 to 64, what are they smoking – medical marijuana? These Congressional Democrats need to take Accounting 101 so they could under stand how balance sheets work.
Here’s how the cuts shake out – $135 billion from hospitals, $118 billion from Medicare Advantage, $15 billion from nursing homes, more than $40 billion from home health care agencies, and about $8 billion from hospice providers. Even though all this Health Care Reform is supposedly about access to care, the reality is that there will be very little access to care for the NEW Medicare recipients (55 – 64 years olds).
Serious Cuts Could Mean Out of Pocket Spending for Americans
If you have a family member who is on Medicare and needs care by either home health or hospice due to all the cuts to Medicare, the family will have to cover these costs themselves. When the cuts go through on hospitals, for example, they will either have to shut down services, ration care or actually close their doors due to poor reimbursement rates, if they serve a large population of Medicare participants. Unfortunately for health care, home health, nursing homes, hospice, etc, , cannot print their own money or borrow from China like the federal government routinely does. If Medicare recipients want care, they may have to pay out of pocket for care since many providers may not even take the government’s low reimbursement for services. It’s called rationing. Rationing will be just another way for the federal government to make money. Keep in mind, health care reform is not about access or actual patient health care, it’s about getting premium dollars into the budget so there is more money and more control by the federal government. If it were about access to care, Congress would be more mindful by taking more time to carefully balance all the entities involved in health care rather than forcing their agenda at a locomotive speed and by not taking responsibility of how their actions will affect all Americans.
Who Will Take Care of Medicare Patients?
Congressional Democrats, who live in their Washington bubble, seem to think they can impose these reductions across the health care spectrum and these businesses will just reset their budgets but as a result – jobs will be lost. Many of these health care companies will not take on any more Medicare patients because they just can’t afford it, if they want to keep their doors open. If that occurs, it will be bad for patients but maybe Congressional Democrats will realize they should stay out of health care and let health care professionals deal with their own problems. The American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association, the American Federation of Hospitals, most health care companies like health insurers and drug makers, are very concerned about this latest attempt of the Congressional Democrats to force their brand of health care reform on Americans.
Health Care is the Locomotive That Runs the Economy But…
With all these cuts in Medicare, plus the mandate on businesses to provide health insurance to their employees and all the new taxes that this Congress is willing to impose for all their pork spending, jobs will be lost. It doesn’t take a economist to understand that concept. Most members of Congress obviously don’t understand how jobs are created, plus they don’t seem to understand how jobs are effectively lost either. Sure the government can create jobs but unlike the private sector, jobs needs to be fully funded before a job can be invented. Not so in the federal government apparently when you look at all the NEW jobs that have been created by the Obama administration. It seems as though all the new jobs in America have been created by the federal government rather than in the private sector. Some say we can’t afford the not do something about health care but what’s on the table in both the Senate and the House puts more Americans at risk of no access to care while forcing our economy to
Image from: Todd’s Health Insurance .com
