Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan's Medicare "kills Medicare"

Your statement that the $700 billion in Medicare cuts to partially fund Obamacare is false, according to Politifact:

" That's the number -- $716 billion to be precise -- that's gotten tossed around this week.

We've posted two fact-checks to explore the back and forth between the campaigns.

In an interview on the CBS program 60 Minutes, Mitt Romney said Obama "robbed Medicare" of $716 billion to pay for "Obamacare." We found that exaggerated what Obama had done in the health care law.

While the health care law reduces the amount of future spending growth in Medicare, the law doesn't actually cut Medicare. Savings come from reducing money that goes to private insurers who provide Medicare Advantage programs, among other things. The money wasn’t "robbed." We rated the statement MOSTLY FALSE.

Responding to the Romney attack, Obama campaign spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said Ryan's budget relies on the same $700 billion in savings from Medicare that Mitt Romney and other Republicans have been attacking Democrats about.

Ryan has confirmed that, and we rated it TRUE."

Looking more closely, note that the Romney/Ryan proposal also projects some $700 plus in Medicare cuts, but these are not taken (as is the case with Obamacare) mostly from Medicare Plus, which is based on a subsidy paid to private health-insurance companies for greater benefits. In fact, the companies are keeping a huge percentage of the subsidy. The Obama savings comes from taking back the part of this subsidy that pay for no increased value in Medicare services.

The Romney/Ryan proposal cuts Medicare benefits from the benefits from themselves, allowing private insurance companies to continue to leech from the American taxpayer. (http://www.politifact.com/tr...

This policy is in keeping with GOP allegiances to the oligarchy.

The Romney/Ryan plan, whatever terms you use to disguise it, is a voucher system. From Politifact:

"For a political discussion aimed at voters rather than policy wonks, we think Obama’s use of the term "voucher" is close enough to earn it a rating of Mostly True."

To people like me, giving me a form of "premium support" (voucher) to go out and find health coverage on my own in my old age is a rotten proposition.

Nothing happens to anyone 55 or over? Politifact rates this a half truth, since services now covered under Medicare as altered by Obamacare will be rolled back. Here is the conclusion:

"Ryan wants seniors to know his and Romney’s Medicare plan "does not affect your benefits." Indeed, that’s the case for their Medicare reform ideas, which would not affect people currently 55 and older.

But his assurance does not take into account one very large elephant in the room: the federal health care law, which alters Medicare primarily by extending more benefits and savings. Romney and Ryan want to "repeal and replace Obamacare," but they haven’t said with what. Repealing the law would take away benefits for current enrollees.

Some experts say it’s unrealistic to expect that level of policy detail. Maybe so, but until the leaders expound upon their plans for closing the doughnut hole for prescription drugs, as well as a number of other Affordable Care Act provisions that would disappear with repeal, we think it’s unrealistic to assure seniors their Medicare provisions wouldn’t change under a Romney-Ryan administration.

We rate his claim Half True."

I've been aware of Medicare's needs for decades. Certainly it needs to be reformed. But, I recall how well the medical care system worked before Congress and Reagan decided to "privatise" it. Once the motive of huge profits was introduced, Pandora's Box of problems began and have continued to eat the heart out of care until this very day. Wall Street began to finance new hospitals, nursing homes, and a host of specialized facilities. Insurance companies forced private physicians to form group practices in order to afford their insurance coverages. The "fee for service" idea brought about needless duplications of exams, laboratory analysis, needless "services", and a host of unbelievably expensive and wasted efforts. Pharmaceutical house now sell pills at prices up to 5,000 times the cost to produce, distribute and market. Where greed is encouraged it will certainly flourish.

Romney and Ryan are playing to the Republican Party obsession with placing Wall Street in charge of something, claiming benefits to society. Mitten can prove how large the benefits of "deregulation" and "Reaganomics" can be, but the other side of the coin is a tale of loss and destruction. The "voucher" idea is nothing short of a scam, a red herring, to shift the medical care of seniors into the hands of insurance companies who will determine what they will cover, what "conditions" they will not inure, and for how much, probably around $2-6,000/month, depending much on the age of the applicants. For MItten and those he is personally acquainted with, such small numbers are of no consequence, about the cost of their gardeners or limo drivers. But, for the remaining 99% of our citizens, the expense would be a total disaster.

Mitten has proposed more tax reductions for his wealthy friends and shifting a greater burden onto workers, with the gap being again added to the National Debt.
There is not enough money collected to feed the military industrial complex and care for our living citizens. The choice is clear, making a larger military (we now spend more than all the remaining nations of the earth combined) or reforming Medicare to remove the greed and profits to public corporations from the system and taking care of ourselves. Clear choice, just muddied by the shams and pretenses.