Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan has remained one of the leading Republican opponents of the president’s public-option health care reform proposal, in spite of the pathetic attempts by the national Democratic leadership and far-left activists in his own home state to falsely discredit him on this issue. Keeping the conservative fight within the health care battle on the offensive, Rep. Ryan published a detailed article with the Journal Times about how President Obama has broken his pledge with American seniors over Medicare.
Repeatedly President Obama has falsely told the American public that if you like your current health care coverage, you can keep it under his health care reform proposal; time and again the majority of the people have patently refused to believe a word this charlatan has said. The president lied directly to the faces of one hundred and eighty thousand people, many of them seniors on Medicare, at an AARP event, saying, “Nobody is talking about cutting Medicare benefits.” But, as Rep. Ryan correctly points out, there is a “yawning gap between the President’s rhetoric and the actual substance of the legislation being pushed through Congress.”
Two of the biggest issues in this country’s health care debate that have failed to be addressed, let alone acknowledged, by the Congressional Democratic leadership have been the cost of the president’s proposal and how it will be paid for. Some Democratic legislators has chosen to play dumb on the issue while others have attacked those who bring up the topics as being against health care reform in the first place. Sooner or later, preferably the former, supporters of the president’s health care bill, particularly seniors, will have to face the fact that in order to pay for Obama’s legislation, we are going to have to do exactly what he said he wasn’t, which was to cut Medicare benefits.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Ryan says, has repeatedly countered the lies of the White House, insisting that the changes as proposed under HR 3200 “would reduce the extra benefits that would be made available to beneficiaries through Medicare Advantage plans” and, what’s more, “could lead many plans to limit the benefits they offer, raise their premiums, or withdraw from the program.” The language of the resolution itself, Ryan points out, directly contradicts the president by stating specifically in Section 1161 that $156.3 billion in Medicare Advantage will be cut. This, Ryan argues, will lead to an “estimated six million current Medicare Advantage beneficiaries” to “no longer be able to afford their current plans or lose access all together.”
What is worse, however, is the blatant attempts by the Obama administration, through the use of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a division the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to place a gag order “Medicare Advantage providers for sharing information with their enrollees about pending changes to their plans.” Not only are they lying to the American people, they are using government programs designed to help the public to cover it up.
Representative Paul Ryan argues that Medicare Advantage serves as precise indicator of how many politicians in Congress operate, breaking what works rather then fixing what is broken. The Wisconsin legislator’s own health care proposal, HR 2520, titled The Patients’ Choice Act, “includes a provision to force Medicare Advantage plans to compete against each other.” Competition stemming from said bidding “would allow the market, not a bureaucratic formula, to set reimbursement rates for Medicare Advantage plans.”
Ryan insists that the plan President Obama and the Congressional Democratic leadership is pushing through Congress goes far beyond what he calls ‘common sense reform.’ Said changes would “dramatically increase premiums for seniors or simply kill Medicare Advantage outright.” It appears as though Mr. Obama has reneged on another one of his promises. But let’s cut him some slack, shall we? He has probably done it so many times during the course of his relatively short tenure in office that it is likely it has become second nature to him, like breathing.
