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.....Impossible Burden For The Elderly And The Disabled
About half the cost of the ACA (Affordable Care Act) is paid for by cuts in Medicare spending and the only practical way those cuts can be made is by reduced fees to providers.
The Medicare actuaries have noted with alarm that Medicare fees to doctors will drop below Medicaid levels in the near future and the combined effect of lower Medicare and Medicaid hospital spending will drive one in seven hospitals from the market in the next five years.
Although the administration talks about making Medicare more efficient, three separate reports by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) have concluded that the pilot programs and demonstration projects that are supposed to find these efficiencies are not working.
In fact, the only place in Medicare that shows any promise at all is in the Medicare Advantage (MA) program. But the administration is determined to proceed with cuts in MA subsides and appears to be paying no attention whatever to the efficiencies MA entrepreneurs are discovering.
Because no serious budget analyst believes the Medicare spending cuts can withstand the inevitable political backlash and because they don’t believe the pilot programs will work either, both the CBO and the Medicare Trustees are annually publishing “alternative forecasts” in an effort to predict how Congress will cave. But if Congress does cave and restores the previous Medicare spending path, that means that the ACA isn’t paid for; and that, in turn, means large unfunded liabilities stretching out indefinitely into the future and increasing federal debt......"
Six Problems With The ACA That Aren’t Going Away
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