For years, the President and his congressional accomplices have
been telling us that the Medicare Advantage (MA) program is too
costly. As Obama claimed during a 2009 interview with ABC’s George
Stephanopoulos: “We are spending a lot of money subsidizing the
insurance companies around something called Medicare Advantage.…
And if we eliminate that and other programs, we can potentially
save $200 billion…” This canard was the pretext for the massive
slashes in MA funding he authorized when he signed Obamacare into
law. As the election year approached, however, the President’s
reelection team evidently noticed a potential problem — the
seniors most likely to be affected by these MA cuts were due to
find out about them just a few weeks before the November
election.
As Benjamin E. Sasse and Charles Hurt
report, open enrollment for MA begins three weeks before voters
go to the polls: “It’s hard to imagine a bigger electoral disaster
for a president than seniors in crucial states like Florida,
Pennsylvania and Ohio discovering that he’s taken away their
beloved Medicare Advantage just weeks before an election.” And it
is no exaggeration to say that MA is “beloved.” Nearly 25 percent
of all Medicare enrollees are on MA, and the vast majority of these
seniors chose the program because of its low co-pays and
comprehensive benefits. It is no coincidence that well over
three-fifths of MA beneficiaries have annual incomes of less than
$30,000 and that the percentage of minorities enrolled in the
program is much higher than is the case for traditional
Medicare.
The electoral significance of these facts would hardly have been
lost on the President’s political advisors when they learned that
Obamacare’s MA cuts would be unveiled to the nation’s most reliable
voters just before the November election. The resultant vision of
surly seniors lining up in their millions at the polls to pull the
lever for Mitt Romney presumably produced urgent emails and frantic
phone calls, followed by a terse directive from the White House to
Obama’s creatures at CMS to come up with plan to put off the cuts
until after the election. In due course, an $8.3 billion
“demonstration project” materialized that would “temporarily
restore Medicare Advantage funds so that seniors in key markets
don’t lose their trusted insurance program in the middle of Obama’s
re-election bid.”
It would appear, however, that the auditors of the Government
Accountability Office (GAO)
smell a rat. “In a rebuke to the Obama administration,
government auditors are calling for the cancellation of an $8
billion Medicare program that congressional Republicans have
criticized as a political ploy.” Naturally, the number crunchers at
the GAO didn’t employ the kind of partisan verbiage that the GOP
used when word of this scam got out. They couched their criticism
in the bland vernacular of the Beltway bureaucrat. Nonetheless,
they pointed
out that this particular demonstration project “dwarfs all
other Medicare demonstrations — both mandatory and discretionary
— conducted since 1995” and “precludes a credible evaluation of
its effectiveness in achieving CMS’s stated research goal.”
In other words, the amount of money being spent on this faux
demonstration project is gigantic compared to legitimate projects
and CMS didn’t bother to outline any real plan for evaluating its
success. The GAO folks are mistaken on the latter assumption,
however. The Obama reelection team, which includes the apparatchiks
at CMS, does indeed have a plan for measuring the success of the
project — they will count the votes cast for the President on
election day. If he receives more votes than Mitt Romney, the
program will be judged a success. Presumably, the transparency of
their motives in this regard is why the Medicare Payment Advisory
Commission (MedPAC) has also raised
concerns: “The panel denounced Medicare’s ‘overly broad use of
demonstration authority.’”
This concern echoes those which have long been voiced by a
variety of Republicans on Capitol Hill, including Senator Orrin
Hatch and Rep. Dave Camp, who released this
statement: “The Obama Administration launched this
demonstration program to divert attention away from cuts to the
popular Medicare Advantage program … Furthermore, it’s unclear
whether the Obama Administration even had the legal authority to
undertake it in the first place.” The response of the White House
to the protests of Republicans and the concerns of nonpartisan
agencies was
predictable: “Asked about the report, White House press
secretary Jay Carney immediately changed the subject to the $200
billion in projected savings from eliminating improper payments
under the health care law.”
At this late date, it’s difficult to restrain a chuckle when
Republicans like Orrin Hatch, the appointees at MedPAC, and the GAO
number crunchers raise concerns about “overly broad” use of power
and lack of “legal authority” by this administration. These people
should know by now that such behavior defines the Obama
White House. For Obama and his accomplices, this $8 billion
“demonstration project” is no different than the Obamacare waivers
or the gag order issued by Kathleen Sebelius in September of 2009
forbidding insurance companies to communicate with their own
customers about the “reform” law while it was being debated in
Congress. These people simply don’t care if their actions are
legal. They will do whatever it takes to win.
And to win this November, they know they must keep as many
seniors as possible in the dark about what has been done to
Medicare Advantage. It isn’t enough to simply lie. They must
maintain the false illusion that the program’s cost and benefits
have not been altered. Thus, $8 billion of our money must be used
to shore up the program until the President has weathered the
election. That this is unethical and probably illegal is utterly
irrelevant to Obama and his mendacious minions.
