Looking for an example to illustrate why Romney/Ryan's $716 Billion Medicare Claim Is A Lie?*
Here is one already coming on line (as reported in the Kaiser Health News on August 13, 2012).
(Oh, and that "2010 health care law" referenced in the article, that would be "ObamaCare" aka Affordable Care Act.)
"More than 2,000 hospitals — including some nationally recognized ones — will be penalized by the government starting in October because many of their patients are readmitted soon after discharge, new records show.
Together, these hospitals will forfeit about $280 million in Medicare funds over the next year as the government begins a wide-ranging push to start paying health care providers based on the quality of care they provide.
With nearly one in five Medicare patients returning to the hospital within a month of discharge, the government considers readmissions a prime symptom of an overly expensive and uncoordinated health system. Hospitals have had little financial incentive to ensure patients get the care they need once they leave, and in fact they benefit financially when patients don’t recover and return for more treatment.
Nearly 2 million Medicare beneficiaries are readmitted within 30 days of release each year, costing Medicare $17.5 billion in additional hospital bills. The national average readmission rate has remained steady at slightly above 19 percent for several years, even as many hospitals have worked harder to lower theirs.
The penalties, authorized by the 2010 health care law, are part of a multipronged effort by Medicare to use its financial muscle to force improvements in hospital quality.
In ten years,
this step alone could account for billions of dollars in savings - from better coordinated, more efficient more effective care. Cutting costs, not care. Cutting costs, not just shifting them from the government to the individual seniors. Cutting costs, not cutting benefits or delaying eligibility.
And this step cuts Medicare costs by applying the kind of 'outcome based', 'bottom-line incentive', creative solutions from the bottom-up approach that the Republicans say the support.
These payment cuts/incentives to providers of health care are not without their own controversies, including claims that they disproportionately impact hospitals providing care to the poor.
But they are not the kind of direct cost shift to private individuals that will result from the kind of capped voucher system proposed by Romney/Ryan that relies on the imaginary ability of individual seniors to negotiate better rates from the massive insurance companies who would be providing coverage under a voucher-driven privatized Medicare insurance system.
* "From PolitiFact Fact Check of Paul Ryan's RNC Convention speech statement that "President Obama "funneled" $716 billion out of Medicare "at the expense of the elderly." (Finding it "mostly false" and "highly misleading".)
"So, they just took it all away from Medicare, $716 billion, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama. An obligation we have to our parents and grandparents is being sacrificed, all to pay for a new entitlement we didn’t even ask for. The greatest threat to Medicare is Obamacare, and we’re going to stop it."
Ryan’s comments are highly misleading. Neither Obama nor his health care law literally cut funding from the Medicare program’s budget. Still, the number has a slight basis in fact.
The health care law instituted a number of changes to try to bring down future health care costs in the program. The total anticipated savings comes to $716 billion over the next 10 years, as determined by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office."
...
So, yes, Obama’s law did find $716 billion in spending reductions. They were mainly aimed at insurance companies and hospitals, not beneficiaries.