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Paul Ryan's New-and-Improved Plan for Medicare and Medicaid Reform
As always, Ryan's "plans" remain hopelessly muddled and detached from reality. But they sure do appeal to the base!
That 14 percent doesn't take into account the positive benefits to the economy and overall medical costs therein because of the preservation of free market forces Medicare Advantage incentivizes. You call it corporate welfare, but by your standard, ANY incentive to use the free market is nothing more than corporate welfare.
What is "the free market" in this context? Is an HMO a free market model of payment? Is subsidizing the additional costs of Medicare Advantage plans (at additional cost to the taxpayer and Medicare beneficiaries who remain in fee-for-service Medicare) the free market approach? I've heard time and again from folks on the right that the existing private insurance industry does not constitute a free market (however they're using the phrase), so you seem to be an anomaly. I'd be interested in hearing what exactly you're talking about.
Beyond that, maybe you can explain those great benefits of the program. It costs more, it's making the entire program less viable in the long run, and it hasn't improved outcomes for seniors. All it does is tack on some additional benefits with extremely limited value-added for the Medicare consumer (Pizer, Frakt, and Feldman pinned the consumer surplus at 14 cents on the dollar for that extra spending). The choice of insurers you get is balanced by the choice of providers you lose in joining an HMO or PPO over FFS Medicare (unless you choose a private FFS plan--but then what's the point of managed care minus the managed care?).
Ohh the same reason they have been getting "bonuses" for some time. Not just Obama.
I think you have a serious problem with facts.
The MA bonus program is part of ObamaCare, it didn't exist before 2010. Unless previous presidents had access to some sort of time machine they could not have used it to pay bonuses to anyone. The thread I started, which I linked to earlier, made that clear, of you had bothered to read it.
Here's a reading tip, genius: "Quotation marks can also be used to indicate a different meaning of a word or phrase than the one typically associated with it and are often used to express irony."
Citizen isn't talking about the specific bonus program, he's obviously talking about the constant "corrections" (quotation marks again!) that have pushed the benchmark bids upward and thus lined the pockets of participating private insurers.
Reality? So Obama care your "Reality a 2700 page law filled with payoffs, more government and bureaucracy, a law which incentivizes businesses to drop their coverage all together, and a law which Obama and most of congress hasn't actually read, and you assumed out of blind faith that that kind of government intervention into our lives is a good thing? I say youre pretty much a crack pot along with the rest of the people who have blind faith in government while we have a 16 trillion dollar debt and no end in sight with that demagogue that is Obama