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Politics : The Obama - Clinton Disaster -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wayners who wrote (66938)	3/3/2012 12:55:37 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	1 Recommendation Respond to of 103300

Obama's 'Trust' In Americans Doesn’t Include Health Care Medicare: President Obama routinely says he trusts the American people. But when push comes to shove, he always puts his faith in Washington bureaucrats. Case in point is the battle over how to control Medicare costs. Last Wednesday, a House subcommittee voted to kill Obama's favored approach to Medicare reform — an unaccountable board of 15 presidential appointees granted virtually unlimited power to cut Medicare spending to meet ObamaCare-imposed annual spending caps. Two Democrats joined 15 Republicans on the committee to kill the board, including the ranking Democrat on the committee, New Jersey's Rep. Frank Pallone. With 227 co-sponsors — among them 17 Democrats — the repeal measure is certain to win approval in the House. And for good reason. Under ObamaCare, the so-called Independent Payment Advisory Board would, starting in 2015, have the authority to dictate spending cuts to meet increasingly stringent annual Medicare annual budget caps, without congressional oversight or input, or the threat of legal challenges. What's more, the IPAB cuts would automatically go into effect unless Congress could cobble together a supermajority to stop them. But troubling as IPAB is, the fight to repeal it is about more than the future of a cost-control board buried in ObamaCare. It's really about two distinct visions of the country — one that puts its faith in top-down Washington bureaucratic decrees and another that trusts free people and competitive markets to find solutions. For Obama, a Medicare Central Committee making payment decisions that affect millions of Americans is the perfect solution. In fact, even before IPAB gets started, Obama wants to grant it still more power as part of his 2013 budget, calling it "a key contributor to Medicare's long-term solvency." But there's another, and far better approach to fixing Medicare that relies on consumer choice and market competition to do what they do everywhere else they're allowed to work — provide increasing quality at decreasing prices. That's the direction Rep. Paul Ryan wants to take Medicare with his reform plan — a reform that has now attracted the support of Oregon's Democratic senator Ron Wyden. The Ryan-Wyden plan would let private insurance companies compete directly with the traditional government-run Medicare program, with the federal government's role essentially limited to providing a fixed "premium support" to enrollees. "Private plans will compete directly with traditional Medicare based on their ability to provide quality coverage at an affordable lower cost," the two explain, with "choice and competition forcing providers to reduce costs and improve quality for seniors." This premium support idea has a strong bipartisan pedigree. Ryan initially worked on it with former Clinton budget director Alice Rivlin, and back in 1998 then-Democratic Sen. John Breaux developed a version of premium support for Clinton's bipartisan Medicare reform commission. Now, Obama and his far-left supporters view this sort of consumer-focused reform as an abomination. A blog post by Nancy-Ann DeParle, Obama's deputy chief of staff, complains that Ryan's plan "does nothing to reduce overall health care costs," and "shifts costs to seniors and empowers insurance companies." She even provides a handy table contrasting the wonderful IPAB with Ryan's dreaded market-based approach. But the relative benefits of IPAB are true only if you believe that 15 unelected bureaucrats can replace the collective wisdom of millions of consumers making their own choices about coverage and costs. Medicare's own history, in fact, shows that top-down controls have been a miserable failure at holding down costs. As in so many other areas, Obama has managed to crystallize the stark choice Americans face in November about the direction of the role of government and the direction of the country.