Obama Administration Dooms Seniors To The Ravages Of Aging By BETSY MCCAUGHEY
The Bear on Oct 12 2012 at 7:40 am | Filed under: Health Care, Politics
On Oct. 1, the Obama administration started awarding bonus points to hospitals that spend the least on elderly patients. It will result in fewer knee replacements, hip replacements, angioplasty, bypass surgery and cataract operations.
These are the five procedures that have transformed aging for older Americans. They used to languish in wheelchairs and nursing homes due to arthritis, cataracts and heart disease. Now they lead active lives.
But the Obama administration is undoing that progress. By cutting $716 billion from future Medicare funding over the next decade and rewarding the hospitals that spend the least on seniors, the Obama health law will make these procedures hard to get and less safe.
The Obama health law creates two new entitlements for people under age 65 — subsidies to buy private health plans and a vast expansion of Medicaid. More than half the cost of these entitlements is paid for by cutting what hospitals, doctors, hospice care, home care and Advantage plans are paid to care for seniors.
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Astoundingly, doctors will be paid less to treat a senior than to treat someone on Medicaid, and only about one-third of what a doctor will be paid to treat a patient with private insurance.
On July 13, 2011, Richard Foster, chief actuary for Medicare, warned Congress that seniors will have difficulty finding doctors and hospitals to accept Medicare. Doctors who do continue to take it will not want to spend time doing procedures such as knee replacements when the pay is so low. Yet the law bars them from providing care their patients need for an extra fee. You’re trapped.
2 Responses to “Obama Administration Dooms Seniors To The Ravages Of Aging By BETSY MCCAUGHEY”
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Friends, who are also retired veterans living in Florida, report that rationing has alrady started there, that many doctors are taking no new patients and that waiting times are growing longer and longer. The sad aspect is that the media could tell all America of this creeping invasion of our rights, but with their own agenda of hiding truth, they dare not he honest with us. I do have to wonder what these people plan to do when they age – perhaps there is some pact among them all that they hold an annual Kool Aid party each year as their own reach 66.
Listening to them privately, they actually believe it, for the most part. But then, that is the boots on the ground troops. The leadership, those in the know, are, I’m pretty sure, planning on being long gone, rich and insulated, or both. Someone once tried to explain to me how doctors would flock to this program because they could practice medicine risk free, with no threat of lawsuits for malpractice.