Here's Barack Obama, at yet another staged "townhall" yesterday on health care. He just doesn't get where people would ever get the crazy notion that he wants to cut Medicare benefits:
"Let me also address I think a misperception that’s been out there that somehow there is any discussion on Capitol Hill about reducing Medicare benefits. Nobody is talking about reducing Medicare benefits. Medicare benefits are there because people contributed into a system. It works. We don’t want to change it."
Well, I don't know, Mr. President - maybe people got that idea from you:
President Barack Obama Saturday [June 13] proposed an additional $313 billion in cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and other programs to pay for health care reforms expected to cost about $1 trillion over the next decade. …
About $110 billion of the new cuts would come from reducing scheduled increases in Medicare payments. That would encourage health care providers to increase productivity, White House budget director Peter Orszag told reporters.
Obama also proposed cutting payments to hospitals to treat uninsured patients by $106 billion on the assumption those ranks would decline as health care reforms phase in.
An additional $75 billion would come from “better pricing of Medicare drugs,” Orszag said, adding the White House was in talks with stakeholders over the best way to do that.
The remaining $22 billion in proposed cuts would come from smaller reforms, such as adjusting payment rates for physician imaging services and cutting waste, fraud and abuse.
Now if Obama feels we should fiddle with Medicare benefits in order to help pay for his health care proposal, fine. But he should be honest about what his intentions are, and while he's at it maybe provide some concrete data supporting this conveniently massive source of savings, instead of making numbers up out of whole cloth.
Or are we supposed to just take Obama's word and ignore the CBO analysis?
h/t: Hot Air.
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