» The biggest takedown of its kind: Today, raids took place in Miami, Tampa, Chicago, Baton Rouge, Detroit, Houston and Los Angeles as part of a three-year ongoing crackdown on Medicare fraud, according to an announcement by Attorney General Eric Holder and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius Wednesday. The frauds included ”every kind of scheme you can think of,” according to one source on the matter.
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The budget-buster’s latest attempt: On Tuesday, powerful Rep. Paul Ryan pitched his latest attempt to trim the deficit by focusing on spending cuts, choosing to leave spending at the Pentagon intact while focusing more on domestic programs. The pitch is largely the same as Ryan’s plan last year. “We owe the country an alternative path if we don’t like the path the president is taking us on.” Ryan said about his plan. “Whoever our nominee is going to be owes the country that choice of two futures. We’re helping them put this together.” A breakdown:
» Detractors abound: Ryan’s plan did not go over well with the Obama administration: “The House budget once again fails the test of balance, fairness, and shared responsibility,” claimed White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer, who said the plan benefited the very rich while shouldering the poor with the bill. Others complained about the lack of detail, including Howard Gleckman, blogging for the Christian Science Monitor, who complains about the lack of details: “His budget includes a convincing and articulate explanation about what’s wrong with a tax system with high rates and a narrow base,” Gleckman writes. “He just doesn’t say what he’d do about it.” What do you think of Ryan’s latest budget plan? (Photo by Gage Skidmore)
Politifact’s controversial “Lie of the Year”: Did the Republicans vote to end Medicare? Politifact says no. Liberal bloggers such as Paul Krugman have long criticized their reasoning on this issue, with Krugman today responding to the “Lie of the Year” with a blog post titled “Politifact, R.I.P.” For what it’s worth, it’s a game of schematics: The Ryan plan, which eventually lost popular support among voters, would’ve heavily privatized the system, making it a shell of its former self, but to Politifact, that isn’t the same as killing it. What do you all think? Vote in our Quipol below:
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Medicare Means-testing on the way? President Obama is eying this common Republican policy idea as a means to a big debt limit deal. As the White House was careful to point out, for the benefit of a liberal base dim on imposing costs on low-income recipients, the Affordable Care Act has already resulted in slightly higher premiums for couples earning over $170,000, or singles earning $85,000 — his ideal would be to raise these further, to “modestly higher premiums.” The question is, would it work? The GOP has been abandoning their own policy proposals when Obama gives them a thumbs up since the health care debate; modest as this is, and we don’t see why that would change. source
We are very willing to entertain savings in Medicare. Medicare gives very good health care very inefficiently.New York Senator Chuck Schumer • Indicating he and his Democratic colleagues are open to “savings in Medicare,” which implies a desire to reduce Medicare spending. This has a lot of people nervous, with overlapping constituencies at play — hospitals get a ton of revenue through these programs, meaning there’s the big lobbyist angle, as well as the everyday citizen who’s getting older and is fearful about Medicare’s uncertainty. What Schumer says is absolutely correct; Medicare is a massively popular program that provides high-quality health care at a very high cost. The question people have when Medicare reform starts getting discussed, though, is whether actual progress on things like efficiency and fraud prevention will occur, or whether they’ll be hit with a benefit cut followed by more of the status-quo. With reports out that the White House is negotiating big Medicare cuts on the debt limit deal, such fears seem understandable. source (via • follow)
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