In October 2013, I did a post on thousands of elderly Americans on Medicare’s Advantage program discovering they’d lost their trusted doctors because their HMOs (health maintenance organizations), in a move to trim costs, have fired those physicians. An example is UnitedHealthCare (UHC), which sent thousands of pink slips to Connecticut doctors caring for Medicare Advantage patients.
I wrote in that post:
Why are thousands of Medicare Advantage doctors being fired?
The answer is ObamaCare.
Under Obamacare, federal funding to Medicare Advantage is being reduced by billions of dollars in coming years. Obama said spending on the Advantage program is higher than regular Medicare and is “unsustainable.”
Mark my words: The firing of Medicare Advantage doctors is just the beginning. President Lucifer is gunning for the Advantage program itself, and ultimately all of Medicare.
Just think: What he and the Demonrats really want is the government’s takeover of the health “care” of all Americans via a “single-payer,” i.e. government-run nationalized, healthcare system.
That’s the ultimate goal of Obamacare.
Once this super-sized Obamacare is in place, Medicare would be superfluous and will be jettisoned, if not sooner.
Last week came news that the POS has proposed a 3.55% cut to Medicare’s Advantage program.
Now, Florida Gov. Rick Scott is confirming what we suspect.
Greg Richter reports for Newsmax, Feb. 25, 2014, that, citing proposed cuts in Medicare Advantage plans, Florida Gov. Rick Scott says the Obama administration is raiding Medicare to pay for Obamacare.
In Washington over the weekend for a National Governors Association meeting, Scott said in a press release on Feb. 24:
“We learned last week that Medicare is being raided to pay for Obamacare, which is hurting our seniors, who could lose access to the doctors they liked and were told they could keep. We need to give our seniors a voice and ask the president directly to not pay for Obamacare by raiding Medicare. He has stopped and delayed other broken parts of the healthcare law. He should do the same with this.”
Appearing on Fox News Channel’s “Your World With Neil Cavuto,” Gov. Scott said he’s seen 300,000 Floridians lose health plans they were promised they could keep, and now senior citizens, a significant part of the state’s population, are telling him they can’t find a doctor who accepts Medicare. ”It’s totally different from what our citizens were promised,” Scott said.
Cavuto noted that several of Scott’s fellow governors said during the weekend conference that Obamacare isn’t going to be repealed, so it is up to them to find ways to make it work.
Meanwhile, as Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn, a medical doctor, points out, enrollment in MEDICAID has increased 1,290% since its inception in 1966, from 4 million to 55.6 million people in 2012. Spending in MEDICAID has increased a whopping 31,212.5%, from $800 million in 1966 to $250.5 billion by 2012.
Medicaid is welfare, but Medicare is not.
Just like Social Security, Americans who work pay into their supposed Medicare benefits via Medicare deductions from our paychecks.
Just like Social Security, the Medicare program is being raided to “re-distribute” the monies to those who don’t work.
To all Americans who are on Medicare:
Just how much longer will you tolerate this?
Until you wake up morning to discover you no longer have Medicare coverage?
UPDATE:
Minutes after I published this post, I received an email from Townhall.com that the POS also slashed another part of Medicare — the home health care services:
On January 1, 2014, ObamaCare cut nearly $22 billion from Medicare home health care over four years. That means an estimated 3.5 million poor and ill homebound senior citizens woke up on New Year’s Day to discover that ObamaCare had slashed funding for their home health care program.
Last year, Medicare home health services were delivered to approximately 3.5 million Medicare beneficiaries. According to the federal government’s own data, these seniors are older, poorer and sicker than the Medicare beneficiary population as whole. Many of these seniors also reside in rural communities, where home health care is especially important because other sources of treatment are often located many miles away.
~Eowyn