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| Source: The Weekly Standard |
By
Jeffrey H. Anderson, Mar. 10. 2014
One of
President Obama’s greatest political challenges has been hiding the fact that
Obamacare is largely financed by siphoning huge sums of money out of Medicare.
In particular, Obamacare cuts—or guts—Medicare Advantage, the popular program
that allows seniors to get their Medicare benefits through private insurers. In
fact, it’s only these Medicare Advantage cuts that allow the Congressional
Budget Office to pretend that Obamacare won’t raise deficits—an implausible
notion that polling indicates only a very small percentage of particularly
credulous citizens believe.
Late
on Friday, February 21, in a 148-page, after-hours communication, the Obama
administration declared that cuts to Medicare Advantage, long put off, will
finally take effect in 2015. Predictably, and understandably, many
conservatives responded by criticizing the announcement.
The
cuts are bad in and of themselves, but cuts to the program have been a part of
Obamacare’s written text from day one. So the real question is not whether
Obamacare will cut Medicare Advantage; it’s whether the Obama administration—which
doesn’t want those cuts to become evident when Medicare’s open-enrollment
period begins on October 15, less than three weeks before Election Day—will
take unilateral, lawless executive action to stop the cuts from taking place.
That’s what has happened to date.
In
the lead-up to Obama’s reelection, he and his administration weren’t satisfied
with having mailed out full-color, taxpayer-funded propaganda brochures and run
millions of dollars’ worth of taxpayer-funded TV ads featuring Andy Griffith,
all touting Obamacare to seniors. They knew that such nonsense would quickly be
exposed if Obamacare’s prescribed Medicare Advantage cuts were to take effect:
Seniors would have started noticing those cuts on October 15, 2012.
To avoid
that, the Obama administration launched an $8.3 billion “demonstration
project.” The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services say such projects
are meant “to test and measure the effect of potential program changes.” This
one, though, was a shameless and almost certainly illegal effort to hide
Obamacare’s Medicare Advantage cuts from seniors until they could no longer
express their displeasure at the ballot box. How big a tally is $8.3 billion?
It’s about seven times what Obama’s campaign raised in total.
Read the full story: www.weeklystandard.com
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