The New York Times reports on a group of researchers and economists who are (to put it politely) puzzled by Romney's claims that he will restore the $714 billion Obama "robbed" from Medicare.
While Republicans have raised legitimate questions about the long-term feasibility of the reimbursement cuts, analysts say, to restore them in the short term would immediately add hundreds of dollars a year to out-of-pocket Medicare expenses for beneficiaries. That would violate Mr. Romney’s vow that neither current beneficiaries nor Americans within 10 years of eligibility would be affected by his proposal to shift Medicare to a voucherlike system in which recipients are given a lump sum to buy coverage from competing insurers.
For those reasons, Henry J. Aaron, an economist and a longtime health policy analyst at the Brookings Institution and the Institute of Medicine, called Mr. Romney’s vow to repeal the savings “both puzzling and bogus at the same time.”... NYT
Of course, muddying the waters and making it almost impossible for people to understand exactly how the competing systems would work is useful to detractors. But some pretty simple math disproves Romney's arguments. Does he know he's wrong? Does he care? Is he, as more than one commenter has suggested, really just returning that $716 billion to the pockets of the health care industry?
I'm with Chris Van Hollen.
“The bottom line,” said Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee, which Mr. Ryan leads, “is that Romney is proposing to take more money from seniors in higher premiums and co-pays and hand it over to private insurance companies and other providers in the Medicare system.” ...NYT
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