ALG Editor’s Note: In the following feature editorial from GoUpstate.com, Medicare’s solvency has been “saved” by cuts in reimbursement rates that will never be made, according to the Board of Trustees and the program’s top actuary:
It’s a wonderful lie
What are we to make of a government that reports funding for one of its programs is going to last an extra 12 years thanks to recently passed health care reform legislation, then admits it’s all a fiction?
That’s exactly what the annual report released late last week by the trustees who oversee Medicare did.
The trustees projected the Medicare Hospital trust fund would be exhausted in 2029, 12 years later than estimated last year.
That would be wonderful were it true, the first good news about funding of a government program in quite some time.
But Medicare’s top actuary, Richard Foster, said the report’s financial projections “do not represent a reasonable expectation for the hospital fund for America’s elderly.”
Huh?
The report is based on the assumption, in fact the law, that says Medicare reimbursements to hospitals and doctors must be cut each year, and not by just a little. The trustees’ report assumes doctors will accept a 30 percent cut in Medicare payments over the next three years.
Those cuts are called for under current law, it’s true, but they are waived by Congress every year because too many doctors would refuse to see Medicare patients if they were enacted.
Just six weeks ago, the most recent $23 billion cut in Medicare reimbursements required by law was waived by Congress.
Projected savings in the new health care law from cuts to hospitals, nursing homes, rehabilitation facilities and doctors are the funding source for approximately $500 billion of the $1 trillion health care reform is projected to cost over the next decade.
Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe any of those cuts will ever happen. The cost of everything goes up, not down, and the political havoc such cuts would wreak has nonpartisan experts agreeing they will never come to pass.
“For these reasons, the financial projections shown in this report for Medicare do not represent a reasonable expectation for actual program operations in either the short range or the long range,” said Foster, who, again, is Medicare’s top actuary.
Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services and one of the trustees who authored the report, said the report must be compiled using current law that demands Medicare cuts to doctors, even if that law is never followed. She has also admitted she does not believe the cuts will ever happen.
If Americans had actually believed our nation could provide a massive expansion of health care benefits while actually cutting the overall cost of health care and reducing the deficit by $1 trillion over the next decade, they would have supported health care reform overwhelmingly. They did not believe it because it isn’t true, because you can’t save money by providing more health care for more people.
So what are we to make of a government that reports funding for one of its programs is going to last an extra 12 years thanks to recently passed health care reform legislation, then admits it’s all a fiction?
Not much.
