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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alex MG who wrote (36030)	4/21/2014 3:10:44 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 42652

If the program spends less then it fiscally will be in better shape (even if the experience for beneficiaries is worse). But it's not particularly likely it will spend less because of a law calling for doctors to be paid less. Every time such a law is about to go in to effect, congress passes and the president signs (no matter which party controls congress and the white house) a "doc fix" bill which temporarily suspends the payment adjustments. They do it temporarily again and again because then each bill doesn't impact future budget figures much. Of course doing it every year for a year has the same effect as doing it forever but doing it year by year doesn't require any budgetary adjustments (other than having a higher then officially projected deficit). Medicare Advantage isn't waste and fraud. Sure some of its spending probably is wasteful but no more so then the rest of the Medicare program. Your links don't even claim a reduction in $716bil of waste and fraud, let alone actually back up the claim.