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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (614297)	6/6/2011 1:57:04 PM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Respond to of 1578422

I suspect you are mis-quoting her and the others. Your right, she didn't say (or at least I'm not certain she said) "Our plan is Medicare". She said "We have a plan, its Medicare" Words to the same effect, but not a technically accurate quote, sorry about that. Links? I could probably give you hundreds, or you could just google the phrase, but here is a few onespot.wsj.com talkleft.com washingtonpost.com ------ The cost controls in Obamacare are primarily one of the following. 1 - Cuts in payments to doctors of the type that have always been rescinded before, and that in the unlikely event that they are kept, would cause many doctors to withdraw from seeing Medicare patients. 2 - Very indirect efforts, with the belief that the actions will reduce costs but little evidence to support that idea. For example the belief that wider coverage will reduce costs by increasing preventative medicine (which while it may produce better results, will actually probably increase costs), and reducing emergency room visits (when the rather limited evidence we have, from state level programs such as "Romneycare" is that emergency room visits have gone up faster than in the rest of the country since the program was enacted). 3 - Simply budgeting less money for programs in the out years, which may be slightly more likely to stick than the doctor payment cuts, but generally the historical record is that the outyear reductions either get canceled or pushed further out, while the actual spending keeps going up. In any case even under the administrations own estimates, and under CBO estimates assuming the law is carried forward as written, government spending does go up by quite a bit. The (probably false) idea that the law is a small net reducer of the deficit is based off of higher taxes not lower costs. Even in the very unlikely event that it does reduce the deficit the law is fiscally irresponsible, since it increases spending (and the fiscal problems are a spending problem as much as they are a deficit problem, the spending will be too high even if the budget is balanced), and uses some of the government's ability to raise extra revenue for only a very small reduction in the deficit. If you care about the deficit, and have no problem with higher taxes, you could impose the same amount of higher taxes, and get a larger deficit reduction. The ability of the government to raise revenue is not unlimited. Obamacare uses up some of that ability.