Oh dear gods. No wonder American healthcare is screwed. People do not understand the system they have, and are easily deceived by how they're being talked to about it.
The bill doesn't take money out of the current Medicare budget but, rather, it attempts to slow the program's future growth, curtailing just over $500 billion in anticipated spending increases over the next 10 years. Medicare spending will still increase, however. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects Medicare spending will reach $929 billion in 2020, up from $499 billion in actual spending in 2009.
None of which would cause providers to want to not accept Medicare patients
now. Whether spending is cut more in the future or is not cut at all (this article you quote seems to think both are going to happen at once) doesn't affect the cuts going on
now. If Medicare reimbursement were fine
now, providers would accept these patients and then drop them
later when and if more cuts occurred.
So while the health care law reduces the amount of future spending growth in Medicare, the law doesn't cut current funding for Medicare.
It doesn't have to cut current funding. What providers care about is reimbursement, and that's already cut, every year. This procedure won't be covered. This one will but for less money. Every year, less money for the same stuff. These cuts happen in
other budgets passed by Congress, so saying
this particular law "doesn't cut current funding" is a rather deceptive way to put it.
Still, where does the $500 billion in future savings come from?
Nearly $220 billion comes from reducing annual increases in payments that health care providers would otherwise receive from Medicare.
The reductions happen every year, they're automatic unless they're actively waived for another year. $220 billion is just adding up the regular cuts over the years.
Other savings include $36 billion from increases in premiums for higher-income beneficiaries
which affects
patients, not their providers. The richer patients will pay more. This is not a reason
providers wouldn't want this. In fact, they'll benefit.
and $12 billion from administrative changes.
this is probably the savings projected from standardizing electronic medical records, as well as some other systems badly in need of reform (pharmacy software springs to mind, you wouldn't believe the antiquated crap in use throughout much of the industry)
A new national board -- the Independent Payment Advisory Board -- will be tasked to identify $15.5 billion in savings, but the board is prohibited from proposing anything that would ration care or reduce or modify benefits.
This sentence reads as if the only possible savings would be from rationing care or reducing/modifying benefits (a common bogeyman suggested by opponents of healthcare reform) even though it obviously isn't, as the sentence prior spoke of administrative costs. There is a great deal of room for necessary improvements in administration--the revenue cycle of medium and large hospital chains is ridiculously overcomplicated.
Then there's another $136 billion in projected savings that would come from changes to the Medicare Advantage program, an alternative to traditional Medicare that has turned out to be much more costly than expected. About 25 percent of Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan.
This is just outright deception. Medicare Advantage is
not Medicare. It's not government-funded healthcare. It's
private insurance companies offering products that are supposed to be parallel and similar to Medicare....except they're run for profit and cost a great deal more. Managed Medicare is a tremendous waste. Even the insurance companies barely scrape a profit out of these products, and wind up spending all the profits on negotiating contracts with the increasingly fewer providers willing to accept these.
If you're having trouble finding providers willing to accept
Managed Medicare patients, that is completely and totally understandable and has nothing to do with actual Medicare or "Obamacare" at all. Providers negotiate their own contracts with insurance companies selling Managed Medicare products, and those that cannot get a contract favorable to themselves will not be seeing those patients. The word "Medicare" in "Managed Medicare" does not mean it's actually real Medicare. It's not.
If you disregard the incendiary word "stole," it is true that savings from Medicare help pay for other parts of the health care law. That's because Democrats wanted to make sure they did not increase the federal deficit with the new health law. The savings from Medicare offset new spending resulting from the health care bill.
Medicare is in need of reform. It would be entirely reasonable to attempt to break even by having the savings from reforms not be directed elsewhere in the budget but instead applied right back to the program. I fail to see why that would be controversial at all, it seems like the author of this article wishes for reform to cost more than it saves, and for more money to be poured into Medicare after reform than before.
