Spreading the Health (Care) Around

posted at 8:48 am on August 28, 2009 by Howard Portnoy
[ Healthcare ]   

Back when he was on the campaign trail, Barack Obama famously let slip his distributive sociopolitical agenda in an exchange with Joe “the Plumber.” Obama admitted that sometimes it’s good to “spread the wealth around.” The problem of course is that when you spread a finite quantity of anything — money, peanut butter, you name it — there is less of it to go around. Everyone gets a taste, which is called “equality” or “fairness,” but no one gets enough to be truly satisfied.

So it is with health care. And once again, Obama has revealed that — despite his dislike of the term “death panels” — his ultimate goal is to cut health care to senior citizens so that those current without health insurance (whether they want it or not) can have a taste. As Karl Rove reports in the Wall Street Journal, Obama recently “told a Montana town hall that he’d pay for health-care reform by ‘eliminating . . . about $177 billion over 10 years’ for ‘what’s called Medicare Advantage.’” Two days later he relayed a similar message, telling “a Colorado town hall he’d cover ‘two-thirds’ of the ‘roughly $900 billion’ of his plan’s cost by ‘eliminating waste,’ again citing Medicare Advantage.”

Medicare Advantage was enacted in 2003 to permit seniors to use funds from Medicare to buy private insurance plans that fit their specific needs and budgets. Medicare Advantage ultimately provides these seniors with better care and better value for their health-care dollar.

Rove further notes:

Medicare Advantage also has built-in incentives to encourage insurers to offer lower costs and better benefits. It’s a program that puts patients in charge, not the government, which is why seniors like it and probably why the administration hates it.

Already, an estimated 10.2 million seniors—one out of five in America—have enrolled in Medicare Advantage. Mr. Obama is proposing to cut the program by nearly 20% and thus reduce the amount of money each will have to buy insurance. This will likely force most of them to lose the insurance they have now. [Emphasis added]

So much for Obama’s promise that “if you like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan”!

If you have an aging parent or other relative currently enrolled in Medicare Advantage, you can gently explain Obama’s grand plan this way. You can tell the person that they’re old and that they’ve already had their “turn.” You can add that the money that was paying for their health care plan is now going to go toward buying health care for a perfect (or imperfect) stranger, who may or may not want coverage. Seems fair enough, doesn’t it?

Cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

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