Today, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued what it is calling a “report” on the supposed improvements to Medicare passed as part of Obamacare.
The first thing to note here is that this so-called “report” isn’t really a report at all. It provides no new information. By all rights, it shouldn’t generate any news, as it contains no news. It’s just a rehash of administration talking points, half-truths, and deceptive arguments, repeated many times previously, based on cost estimates produced by the chief actuary of the Medicare program in April and by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in March.
So why is HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius touting this so-called “report” today, four months after the law’s passage, including scheduling a conference call about it with reporters?
Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that another Medicare report — the Medicare trustees’ report — is also scheduled to come out later this week. The trustees’ report always generates news because it is the once-a-year update to the long-term cost projections for the Medicare program. The report must be approved by the Medicare Board of Trustees, which is made up almost entirely of political appointees from the Obama administration. But the report itself is largely written by the chief actuary, Richard Foster, and his staff, who are civil servants in the executive branch but, by longstanding tradition, are given much more independence than other federal workers because of the importance and sensitivity of their estimates and judgments.
That independence was on full display when the chief actuary released his cost projections for Obamacare on April 22, including a separate memorandum directly addressing the issue of Medicare trust fund solvency.
On the surface, the chief actuary’s findings would seem to confirm one of the administration’s main talking points — which is that the new health law will postpone depletion of the Medicare hospital insurance (HI) trust fund by a dozen years, to 2029. But a full reading of both memoranda makes it clear that the apparent good news on trust fund solvency is nothing but a mirage.
The problem is that the administration is trying to count the same Medicare cuts and tax increases twice, once to pay for a massive entitlement program to expand insurance coverage to low and moderate income households, and then again to fill the coffers of Medicare so future benefits can be paid.
That of course seems fishy to commonsense Americans, and for good reason. Even the federal government hasn’t found a way to spend the same money twice — a point both the chief actuary and CBO confirmed in their separate analyses of Obamacare. As stated by the chief actuary’s office, “In practice, the improved [Medicare hospital insurance] financing cannot be simultaneously used to finance other Federal outlays (such as the coverage expansions under the [the new health law]) and to extend the trust fund, despite the appearance of this result from the respective accounting conventions.”
In other words, because Congress spent the Medicare savings on a new entitlement program, when Medicare’s bills mount in 2017 and beyond, the federal government is in no better position today than it was before enactment of Obamacare to pay them. On paper, Medicare’s HI trust fund has new reserves, but those reserves are not backed by real assets. When Medicare’s costs rise, the federal government is still going to have to borrow more money, raise new taxes, or cut spending elsewhere to meet its obligations. The administration and its allies in Congress could have improved the government’s ability to pay Medicare’s bills in the future by devoting all of the Medicare cuts and taxes to deficit reduction. But that’s not what they did; consequently, we now have more government obligations and much less flexibility to find ways to pay for it all.
The HHS “report” released today also continues to ignore another important finding by the chief actuary about Obamacare, which is that the deep, arbitrary, and across-the-board payment-rate reductions for hospitals, nursing homes, and other providers of medical services are highly unlikely to be sustained because they will harm access to care for Medicare’s enrollees. The largest cut enacted by Congress would impose an annual reduction in the inflation update for many institutional providers of care. This cut would occur every year, in perpetuity, thus driving payment rates down well below what private payers will be forced to pay. These kinds of arbitrary price controls always drive out willing suppliers of services. The chief actuary expects about 15 percent of the nation’s hospitals would lose so much money from Medicare patients that they would have to drop out of the program. And yet the HHS “report” continues to argue that Obamacare will “strengthen” the program on behalf of beneficiaries.
Similarly, the HHS paper glosses over the deep reductions in the Medicare Advantage program (some $150 billion over ten years), arguing in Orwellian fashion that the Medicare Advantage cuts will somehow be good for seniors. As the chief actuary has noted, Obamacare will push millions of seniors out of the health insurance plans they voluntarily selected, and millions more will now pay hundreds if not thousands of dollars more for their health care every year as a result the new law’s cuts.
The administration is clearly in full campaign mode now. Seniors are a critical voting bloc in an off-year election. Democrats have now targeted them with taxpayer-funded mailings that are blatantly deceptive, a taxpayer-funded television campaign featuring Andy Griffith that FactCheck.org has said uses “weasel words” to avoid telling the truth, and now a Medicare “report” that is a rehash of Team Obama’s stale and discredited talking points. Unfortunately for the administration, no matter how much money they throw at the problem, it’s unlikely to work. America’s seniors have enough common sense to know that down is not up, and up is not down, no matter how many times the president says otherwise.