From my perspective, having covered this issue in the past, the coverage seems somewhat better than it was years ago. But: there has been little examination of what might happen if Medicare is divided into two parts, one with vouchers, the other with traditional Medicare—what experts call the “death spiral” for traditional Medicare.
And there is still way too much he said/she said reporting on this issue, in which reporters assume each side’s argument carries equal weight, even when they don’t, resulting in a faux balance. An NPR interview last week featuring Joe Antos, who represents the American Enterprise Institute, and Neuman of the Kaiser Family Foundation comes to mind. So does a piece that ran Sunday in the Tampa Bay Tribune, which is classic he said/she said. The dueling positions were headspinning.
The new spin
The media are beginning to understand that the president’s cuts to Medicare do not affect basic benefits. Now a new line of attack from the GOP is emerging. Antos on the NPR Morning Edition segment warned that seniors may find it harder to find the care they want—access problems, in other words—as a result of the spending cuts. “If you take enough money out of the Medicare program,” he said, “eventually you will run into access problems for seniors.”
On the NewsHour Friday, National Review editor Rich Lowry told Judy Woodruff that “technically they don’t hit benefits, the cuts. But when you are hitting the providers, the physicians, and the hospitals as hard as these cuts do year over year, they become totally unsustainable.”
The specter of rationing rides again! Still, Lowry’s comments touches on the crux of the nation’s health care dilemma: How do we control costs? On whose backs will sacrifice fall?
Each time there’s an attempt to reduce what providers are paid, they fight back, refusing to care for Medicare patients or threatening to do that. And that raises a question for jounos to explore: Is the country serious about reducing the national health care tab? And if so, how should it be done?
Trudy Lieberman’s “Medicare primer” is here. And an archive of her critiques of press coverage of the issue is here.
Good piece, Trudy. And Jackie Calmes of NYT got another underreported aspect of this in her article today pointing out that if Romney restored the $716 billion in reduced Medicare spending over 10 years that would raise beneficiaries' premiums significantly and also hasten the insolvency date of the Medicare hospital trust fund. He has no good response to that critique.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/22/us/politics/costs-seen-in-romneys-medicare-savings-plan.html?_r=1&hp
Another underreported issue is whether the Ryan-Romney proposal to have their capped, privatized, voucherized Medicare proposal only apply to people under 55 is politically viable. That would mean a big policy cliff between Americans based on one day's difference in birthdays. People born on one day would be guaranteed (with the death spiral caveat you mention) access to the traditional uncapped Medicare program which would pay for their full benefits. People born one day later would be shoved into the capped, voucherized program where they likely would be exposed to significantly increased out of pocket costs. Would Americans stand for that gross disparity?
#1 Posted by Harris Meyer, CJR on Wed 22 Aug 2012 at 12:53 PM
A teacher would be fired if her lectures were as unpredictable as the events the news media must investigate. And her license would be taken away if she repeatedly interrupted her lectures with advertisiements that featured sexually attractive actresses. Which makes it easy for Republicans to lie about Obamacare. But is the news media going to improve their profession by communicating like a teacher instead of a reporter?
#2 Posted by Stanley Krauter, CJR on Wed 22 Aug 2012 at 04:33 PM
Yes it is accurate only, I strongly agree with Ryan's plan. There is a possibility to cut medicare costs...
http://www.medicarehawaii.com/
#3 Posted by Nikki, CJR on Thu 23 Aug 2012 at 05:27 AM
Trudy...
If you are honestly trying to make the claim that cutting nearly a TRILLION dollars in Medicare funding won't effect Medicare benefits...
You need to sell that load of baloney somewhere else.
You can spin all you want with your standard one-sided dependence on purported "expert" analysis from leftist advocacy groups... And you can play the semantic "savings" versus "cuts" game all day long.
But chopping nearly a TRILLION dollars from Medicare is what it is.
We all know what really happened. Obama robbed Medicare to fund Obamacare. He took money destined to care for old people to give instead to the people he deems to be "poor".
That's just the REALITY here.
#4 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Thu 23 Aug 2012 at 12:04 PM
Val, that isn't the REALITY so just stop it.
The hospitals agreed to medicare price cuts in exchange for the mandate, which would eliminate much of their unisured visits to the emergency room overhead, and by scrapping the stupid medicare advantage program which did not bring any private sector cost containment magic to Medicare provision.
And it's kind of rich of the republicans to complain about this when they voted not for cost containment, but for a complete scraping of the entire Medicare system for Paul Ryan's (who's only the vice presidential candidate these days) Medicare coupons for private coverage which we know, from medicare advantage, will not contain costs and we know, from Paul Ryan's proposal, that the design is not to insure seniors health care costs - but to offload them onto seniors personal pocketbooks. We've seen how this works when it came to pharmacology, seniors go in to penury and/or take desperate trips up to Canada to attempt to get a better deal.
So yeah, republicans should stfu on Medicare since they've hated the program since the beginning, have done nothing but hurt the program's solvency while in charge, and rely on the same medicare cuts to make their projections as democrats under their coupon program.
And since when did fiscal responsibility entail complaining about cost cutting?
#5 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 23 Aug 2012 at 01:30 PM
Linked to from here:
http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/the-morning-plum-no-romney-and-ryan-dont-really-want-a-great-debate/2012/08/21/821297d0-eb7a-11e1-9ddc-340d5efb1e9c_blog.html
Is this:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/21/the-only-big-idea-coming-out-of-the-romney-ryan-camp-is-the-big-lie.html
"I think they wanted exactly that. But that sure isn’t what they’re getting. Romney and Ryan are both turning somersaults to say that they are this big government program’s true protectors. Ryan even dragged his mother into it over the weekend! And as for Romney, it is just astonishing to hear him stand up as he did last week and whack Obama for cutting $716 billion from Medicare while lavishing praise on Ryan, whose Medicare plan from last year cuts exactly the same $716 billion (and then some), and say that he and Ryan are going to save Medicare, unlike that nasty Obama.
The truth, of course, is that Ryan’s premium support plan would devastate Medicare because it would slow the increased spending to a rate well below the rate at which health-care costs have been rising in recent years. In polls like one the Kaiser Family Foundation commissioned earlier this year, even majorities of Republicans don’t want Medicare restructured along Ryanesque lines. These guys may not be able to count, but they can read polls, and so they know very well that if they gave the county the honest debate we were told we were going to have about Medicare, and for that matter about taxation, they’d wake up Nov. 7 with about 120 electoral votes in their pockets and conservatism in tatters.
They know this. They know that the truth would crush them electorally. And so it follows that they know they must lie. They must lie about their Medicare plans. They must lie about the effects of their tax plans on average people and rich people. And they must tell a number of lies about Obama, all the better if they involve race, as the welfare lie does.
So this will be the entire point of the Romney-Ryan campaign. Lie lie lie. Muddy the waters. Turn day to night, fire to water, champagne to piss. Peddle themselves as the precise opposite of what they actually are. That is clearly the m.o.
This is the case for two reasons. First, it is forced on them historically. Ronald Reagan could get away with sunny generalizations about supply-side economics because in 1980, it was just a theory. Now, after George Dubya, it’s been utterly discredited in practice. Conservatives still must believe these absurd things—that lower tax rates will produce more revenue—but now we know they’re not true, so they have to lie about them. And second, it is simply in Romney’s weasely nature never to say anything forthright about any topic."
#6 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 23 Aug 2012 at 02:45 PM
And there's this:
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/08/surrogates-admit-romney-will-cut-medicare-benefits-for-current-seniors.php
As Greg Sargent said in the link above:
"The guiding idea for Romney and Ryan is to “get government out of the way” by repealing Obama’s signature initiatives and gutting regulation. The GOP candidates vaguely promise to replace those things, without saying with what — because admitting they’d replace them with nothing would be politically unthinkable."
So they got nothing to run on.
#7 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 23 Aug 2012 at 02:49 PM
Oh neat.
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/08/23/igmfy-young-people/
"One of the pure joys of campaign reporting is the “headlines” e-mail. When a candidate has a particularly good day—a killer debate, a speech that goes off with no falling lights or flags—journalists get a missive from the campaign that runs through the bedazzled takes of your peers. The subtext is this: Why haven’t you written your story about how fantastic we’re doing?
On Saturday, shortly after Rep. Paul Ryan spoke at The Villages in Florida, the Romney campaign sent out no fewer than 14 incredible headlines. “Nothing but Cheers for Paul Ryan’s Medicare Plan at The Villages,” reported the Tampa Bay Times. (The planned community, where souped-up golf carts dominate the roads, is a Republican stronghold.) “Ryan Campaigns With Mother, Vows To Protect Medicare for Seniors,” reported the Hill."
The Villages? What in the hell are those. (protip: if you sleep there, the pod people will get you)
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/08/23/master-of-the-villages-of-the-damned/
"Via Dave Weigel, Tampa Bay Times reporters Michale Van Sickler and John Martin on the The Villages, its developer, and how it’s been set up to “provide a foundation for Republican candidates“..
Read the whole thing. Property control, local taxation authority, and socially-sanctioned authoritarianism enforced via media domination: The only difference between H. Gary Morse and your average feudal baron is better medical technology and worse public architecture."
It's all about stagecraft with these people.
#8 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 23 Aug 2012 at 07:55 PM
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#9 Posted by PETERSENSummer20, CJR on Fri 24 Aug 2012 at 03:32 PM
Kevin Drum did a post on this:
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/08/itsy-bitsy-716-billion-medicare-qa
"There's no way to cut a bunch of money out of anything and guarantee that it will have no effect whatsoever.
However, the basic shape of the river here is pretty simple: Obamacare does indeed reduce Medicare spending by $716 billion (over ten years), but it doesn't reduce Medicare benefits by a single dime. It's unlikely that Medicare beneficiaries will see any noticeable effects at all."
#10 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 24 Aug 2012 at 10:54 PM
I agree with you! I agree with Ryan's plan. There is a possibility to cut medicare costs!
www.medicarearkansas.com
#11 Posted by julieanderson, CJR on Tue 20 Nov 2012 at 05:05 AM