This is Avik Roy:
The President’s campaign is releasing a booklet this morning featuring the President’s re-election “plans.” Unfortunately, many of them involve funny money and fuzzy math. Take for instance the section on retirement security, which claims that ObamaCare “strengthened Medicare by cutting overpayments to insurance companies and cracking down on billions in health care waste, fraud and abuse. The President added eight years to the Medicare Trust Fund.”
There’s just one problem with these assertions — they aren’t true. Take the claims about “waste, fraud, and abuse.” First, ObamaCare’s $300 billion in cuts to Medicare Advantage will reduce the program’s enrollment by half and plan choices by two-thirds. Moreover, the non-partisan Medicare actuary said that ObamaCare would have a direct impact on beneficiaries in traditional Medicare as well. He has concluded that over the long-term, up to 40 percent of providers would become unprofitable due to ObamaCare, and could “have to withdraw from providing services to Medicare beneficiaries.” Earlier this month, an Alabama hospital took a different course — it decided to shut down entirely, due to the impact of ObamaCare on its business model.
More from Chris Jacob.
In the 19th Century, it wasn’t unheard of for politicians to pay constituents for votes with cash payments, livestock and even whiskey. Although election-day gifts of pigs, chickens and whiskey have long since gone by the wayside, modern day political parties have other ways of buying votes — at least that’s what Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, is alleging. Issa, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is accusing the Department of Health and Human Services of using an $8 billion program that pays bonuses to Medicare Advantage plans to “buy” the election.
His office wants to investigate whether they bonus payments are designed to temporarily hide the detrimental effects of the Affordable Care Act from seniors until after the election. The ACA, the federal health care law signed into law by President Obama, is slated to cut about $716 billion from the Medicare program over the next decade. Of this, $156 billion is due to be cut from Medicare Advantage plans. Issa has threatened to subpoena the documents on the Medicare Advantage bonus program if the Department of Health and Human Services does not willingly turn them over.
More about this issue from Fox News.
From an annual report from Fidelity Investments:
For a 65-year-old couple retiring this year, the cost of health care in retirement will be $240,000, 6 percent more than that same couple retiring in 2011 would pay. The report assumes that the man will live 17 years and the woman 20…The $240,000 number captures the Part B premium for physician services, Part D for prescription drugs.
Another study, this one from Nationwide Financial, found that people who were near retirement routinely and wildly overestimated the percentage of health care costs covered by Medicare. It covers only 51 percent of health care services, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute.
More from Paul Sullivan on retirement planning in the NYT.
