>Subject: Finally! Obamacare-Ryan's Compared
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>Clear and very informative. Please pass along to retired friends/family
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>How does Obama's plan work? From WSJ Aug.17,2012
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>The larger reality is that Medicare cannot and will not continue as it is, AS THE PRESIDENT USED TO ADMIT.
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>A sampler of his rhetoric from the town-hall summer of 2009: "Mark my words," he declared in Grand Junction, Colorado, "Medicare in about eight to nine years goes into the red. . . . It is going broke." He added in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, that "What is truly scary—what is truly risky—is if we do nothing" because Medicare is "unsustainable" and "running out of money." In Belgrade, Montana, he said the program must be reformed "to be there for the next generation, not just for this generation."
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>What he rarely mentions is how he plans to fix Medicare under ObamaCare. First the government will do things like arbitrarily commanding providers TO DELIVER THE EXACT SAME BENEFITS EXCEPT FOR $716 BILLION LESS. When that doesn't work, as it surely won't, the feds WILL TAKE CONTROL OF THE CASE-BY-CASE DECISIONS currently made between patients and doctors and substitute the judgment of technocrats.
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>The president's Affordable Care Act uses Medicare as a piggy bank, stripping today's program of $716 billion. And THE LAW'S WAY OF DEALING WITH THE ENSUING MEDICARE SHORTAGES is to empower a group of 15 individuals to make decisions on what medical services will need to be cut. So how does the Democratic Party intend to fix Medicare? Cut Medicare dollars($716 BILLION), ration care. Now we know.
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>It is this Obama Medicare plan—not the status quo(Medicare 2012)—that Republicans are running against. It is against this that they are contrasting Mr. Romney's proposal to restore that $716 billion, to preserve existing benefits for those 55 and above, and to give younger Americans more options and continued quality care.
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>Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney are proposing an alternative to protect Medicare patients from this government-run future, and nothing in the GOP Mediscare counterattack is remotely as misleading as the attacks that Mr. Obama has been making against their reform. The Romney-Ryan plan doesn't "end Medicare as we know it," doesn't include vouchers, and doesn't force seniors to shoulder the $6,400 in higher health costs that Mr. Obama mentions at every campaign stop.
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>Their "premium support" reform explicitly preserves traditional fee-for-service Medicare. Starting in 2023, seniors could either pick traditional Medicare or choose from a menu of regulated private plans. The reform is MODELED AFTER THE HEALTH PROGRAM THAT ALREADY COVERS ALL FEDERAL WORKERS, INCLUDING MEMBERS OF CONGRESS. The subsidies increase with health costs, so seniors wouldn't bear more risk.
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>The plan wouldn't kick in for a decade, shielding everyone who is in or near retirement. Our preference would be to start immediately, but the delay is one of many political accommodations to help ease the worries of current retirees.
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>How does Ryan's plan work? From the WSJ, Aug.20,2012
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>"The $6,400 Myth"
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>Breaking down a false Obama Medicare claim.
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>One of President Obama's regular attacks on Paul Ryan's Medicare reform is that it would force seniors to pay $6,400 a year more for health care. But merely because he keeps repeating this doesn't mean it's in the same area code of accurate.
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>The claim is based on a now out-of-date Congressional Budget Office estimate of the gap between the cost of health care a decade from now, in 2022, and the size of the House budget's premium-support subsidy for a typical 65-year-old in 2022.
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>In other words, the $6,400 has no relevance for any senior today. None. But it also is unlikely to have any relevance for any senior ever because CBO CONCEDES THAT ITS NUMBER IS HIGHLY UNCERTAIN and "will depend on the evolution of the health care and health insurance systems over time, which is hard to predict." That's for sure.
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>The more fundamental problem is that the CBO analysis has nothing to do with the current Mitt Romney-Paul Ryan plan. Nada. Over the last year Mr. Ryan has made major adjustments to his original proposal as he sought a compromise with Democrats. In its most up-to-date analysis, CBO admits that it "does not have the capability at this time to estimate such effects" in the new version. That is, it does not have the tools to make its $6,400 exaggeration again.
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>The reason CBO can't model the 2013 House budget and the Romney-Ryan plan is that THEY HARNESS MARKETS WITH COMPETITIVE BIDDING. Congress's budget gnomes can't handle these dynamic forces.
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>So how would Ryan 2.0 work in practice? Traditional Medicare and all private insurers in a region would make bids to cover seniors and COMPETE FOR THEIR BUSINESS by offering the best value and prices. Then the government would give everyone a subsidy equal to the second-lowest bid.
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>If seniors chose that No. 2 option, whether it was Medicare or another plan, they'd break even and pay nothing extra out of pocket. If they picked the cheapest plan, they'd keep whatever was left over after the government subsidy—that is, they'd get a cash refund. If they instead picked the third-cheapest option, the fourth-cheapest, etc., they'd pay the difference above the government subsidy.
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>That structure ensures that seniors would have at least two choices (and likely far more) that they are guaranteed to do better than they do now. The amount of the premium-support subsidy would also be tied to underlying health-care costs, so it would not shift costs to beneficiaries, as Democrats also falsely claim. The very reasonable Romney-Ryan policy bet is that costs could nonetheless fall over time because seniors would have the incentive to switch to the most competitively priced Medicare plan.
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>The latest real-world reason to expect that would happen comes from a new paper by the Harvard economists Zirui Song, David Cutler and Michael Chernew. The researchers—Mr. Cutler used to be an Obama health adviser—looked at Medicare Advantage, the program that currently gives one of four seniors private alternatives (and that ObamaCare deliberately undermines).
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>The Advantage insurers make bids today against a benchmark set by traditional Medicare spending, and the Harvard trio find that the second lowest bid in 2009 came in 9% below the normal program on average. Medicare costs $717 per person per month, but the cheapest private plan could provide the same coverage for 87 cents on the government dollar. The second cheapest could do it for 91 cents.
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>Messrs. Song, Cutler and Chernew are alarmed because they say their results imply—broadly speaking—that seniors in traditional Medicare would have to pay $64 a month more if they kept that coverage. (Note: That totals $768 a year, not $6,400.) But a better way of reading the data is that seniors would migrate to more cost-effective options, saving both themselves and taxpayers a bundle.
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>None of these facts are likely to deter Democrats from their distorted claims. But the truth is that the Ryan-Romney reform isn't anywhere close to Mr. Obama's cartoon version.
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444772404577587464183295348.html>
http://www.politicalnewsnow.com/2012/08/17/kimberley-strassel-why-republicans-can-win-wsj/>
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444508504577595350022637244.html>
>ps
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>MEDICARE ADVANTAGE IS SOON TO BE 10 YEARS OLD, AND IS COMING IN 43% BELOW ITS ORIGINAL 10 YEAR COST PROJECTIONS.
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>ANY QUESTIONS? Go here:
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_Advantage>
