Voucher or no voucher, the Obama administration projected that Medicare will be slashed by $11.1 billion next year, due to the requirements of a deficit-reduction law unless overridden by statute, according to a story by Rich Daly.
Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has proposed switching Medicare over to a voucher program, where recipients will get a lump sum payment every year, rather than a percentage of each medical bill they accrue, as the federal program now stands.
As you may recall, the painful bickering over budgets and expenditures last year resulted in a 2-percent cut in the $554.3 billion that Medicare projects to spend on providers and insurance plans in 2013, as required by the Budget Control Act of 2011.
“The Medicare cuts are part of the $1.2 trillion in 10-year cuts the law required after bipartisan negotiations on a comprehensive and bipartisan deficit reduction plan failed last year,” Daly noted.
Almost $6 billion will be taken from the Federal Hospital Insurance Trust Fund, according to the administration report released Friday. Experts have predicted that the fund will be insolvent by 2017, anyway, due to the way it is set up.
Even worse, a new report found that more than 766,000 jobs nationwide would be lost as a result of the 2-percent cut, according to the report released this week by the American Hospital Association, the American Medical Association and the American Nurses Association.
And Betsy McCaughey, former Lt. Governor of New York State, took it one step further. Scientific evidence published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, “suggests that forcing hospitals to spend less on elderly patients will produce deadly results,” she said.
Perhaps expectedly, the Obama administration opposes the cuts but “remains deadlocked with congressional Republicans over sharp differences in their preferred approaches to replace the coming spending reductions,” Daly reported, “while achieving the same amount of reductions in future deficits, according to senior administration officials who asked not to be quoted by name during a Friday media call.”
"Hopefully as more people see this report today and they see the consequences of the sequester going into place that will move the Republicans toward compromise,” an official said, “but without compromise the report stands as a forecast into what our future might look like.”
Also subject to the 2-percent cut are “community and migrant health centers,” which will lose $27 million; more than $2.5 billion, or about 8 percent, coming from the $35 billion National Institutes of Health budget, requiring “NIH to halt or curtail scientific research in certain areas, you know, cancer and childhood diseases,” an administration official told Daly.
Edited by
Braden Becker
