Month: August 2010

The Trustees of the Medicare Trust Fund announced, Aug. 5, that the Fund’s solvency has been extended 12 years by the ‘Affordable’ Care Act better known as ObamaCare and now frequently referred to as 0Care with the first symbol being a numeral and not a letter.

The fund’s trustees include Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen “Wash-Your-Hands-After-You-Sneeze-Or Swine-Flu-Will-Kill-Us-All” Sebelius; Treasury Secretary Tim “Taxes-For-Thee-But-Not-For-Me”  Geithner; Labor Secretary Hilda “Illegals Need Raises ” Solis, and  Social Security Commissioner Michael J. “Tough Break Kids” Astrue, all of whom are members of the 0 Administration. These were the ones who appeared at the press conference to provide the pretty picture of unicorns and rainbows .

Was what they said true?  Maybe, which is rather remarkable since they are members of the 0 Administration and their lips were moving. They did, however, have to struggle to ignore Mephistopheles leeringly grinning over their shoulders as he pondered his future payment for this small and temporary possible success.

The report can be found here as a pdf.  Skip the baloney which is basically everything up until “Statement Of Actuarial Opinion” which was written by the widely respected Richard S. Foster, who chief actuary for the centers of Medicare & Medicaid Services, and says:

While the Part B projections in this report are reasonable in their portrayal of future costs under current law, they are not reasonable as an indication of actual future costs. Current law would require physician fee reductions totaling an estimated 30 percent over the next 3years — an implausible result.
Further, while the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, as amended, makes important changes to the Medicare program and substantially improves its financial outlook, there is a strong likelihood that certain of these changes will not be viable in the long range. Specifically, the annual price updates for most categories of non-­physician health services will be adjusted downward each year by the growth in economy-­wide productivity. The best available evidence indicates that most health care providers cannot improve their productivity to this degree — or even approach such a level — as a result of the labor-­intensive nature of these services.
Without major changes in health care delivery systems, the prices paid by Medicare for health services are very likely to fall increasingly short of the costs of providing these services. By the end of the long-­range projection period, Medicare prices for hospital, skilled nursing facility, home health, hospice, ambulatory surgical center, diagnostic laboratory, and many other services would be less than half of their level under the prior law. Medicare prices would be considerably below the current relative level of Medicaid prices, which have already led to access problems for Medicaid enrollees, and far below the levels paid by private health insurance. Well before that point, Congress would have to intervene to prevent the withdrawal of providers from the Medicare market and the severe problems with beneficiary access to care that would result. Overriding the productivity adjustments, as Congress has done repeatedly in the case of physician payment rates, would lead to far higher costs for Medicare in the long range than those projected under current law.
For these reasons, the financial projections shown in this report for Medicare do not represent a reasonable expectation for actual program operations in either the short range (as a result of the unsustainable reductions in physician payment rates) or the long range (because of the strong likelihood that the statutory reductions inprice updates for most categories of Medicare provider services will not be viable.)

Foster encourages readers to check his projections at this pdf . To sum it up in one sentence he is saying “Soylent Green is people”