No, it's not. What I posted doesn't say it will reduce quality of care. There is a reason for this.
Like I said, I was doing research to refresh my memory. I was going to write up a long post, but then I found this nice summary:
"
The blue section represents reductions in how much Medicare reimburses private, Medicare Advantage plans. That program allows seniors to join a private health insurance, with the federal government footing the bill. The whole idea of Medicare Advantage was to drive down the cost of health insurance for the elderly as private insurance companies competing for seniors’ business.
That’s not what happened. By 2010, the average Medicare Advantage per-patient cost was 117 percent of regular fee-for-service. The Affordable Care Act gives those private plans a haircut and tethers reimbursement levels to the quality of care administered, and patient satisfaction.
The Medicare Advantage cut gets the most attention, but it only accounts for about a third of the Affordable Care Act’s spending reduction. Another big chunk comes from the hospitals. The health law changed how Medicare calculates what they get reimbursed for various services, slightly lowering their rates over time. Hospitals agreed to these cuts because they knew, at the same time, they would likely see an influx of paying patients with the Affordable Care Act’s insurance expansion.
The rest of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicare cuts are a lot smaller. Reductions to Medicare’s Disproportionate Share Payments — extra funds doled out the hospitals that see more uninsured patients — account for 5 percent in savings. Lower payments to home health providers make up another 8.8 percent. About a dozen cuts of this magnitude make up the green section above."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/14/romneys-right-obamacare-cuts-medicare-by-716-billion-heres-how/
So, to review:
It reduces payment to Medicare Advantage, which has failed to reduce healthcare costs and is currently 14% more expensive then regular Medicare, and ties payments to quality of care and customer satisfaction. So, no reduction of quality of care here.
It reduces payment to hospitals. But hospitals have agreed to these cuts, because they will be seeing new revenue coming in from the Affordable Care Act, which WILL significantly expand the number of people with healthcare, much like the law has done for Massachusetts when it was implemented by Romney. Nope, no reduction of quality of care here, either.
Finally, the remaining third of the cuts are small haircuts to a variety of other programs. Given that I've yet to find anything more in depth that describes what these cuts do, I can't say anything about them.
But to claim that this WILL result in a reduction in the quality of care, and that this WILL force most doctors to abandon Medicare seems dubious at best. Is there a chance that these cuts will have unforeseen consequences? I'm sure. New laws often do. After all, Medicare Advantage was supposed to make medical treatment cheaper, and it clearly hasn't. But the best I've been able to find about reducing quality of care from someone who isn't connected to the Romney campaign is that we simply don't the full scope of what the cuts will do yet. At the very least, the intentions of these cuts are sound, and are meant to cut costs without reducing quality of care. Whether they will or not, only time will tell. And that's when this discussion will be worth having again.
I'll let you have the last word on this. There are always two sides to an argument, otherwise there wouldn't be one, regardless of how dubious one side may (or may not) be. But the more I look into this, the more it sounds like just another Republican talking point that stretches the truth, much like Obama's "gutting' of welfare reform. Or how there isn't a consensus on global warming among scientists. But hey, if what you say turns out to be true, we'll find out soon enough. Either way, these cuts are only a short term fix to a long term problem.
