House Dems look to exempt Medicare from automatic spending cuts
From the Hill –
While some Republicans are taking heat for seeking to mitigate $600 billion in sequestration cuts to the Defense Department, a handful of House Democrats this week put forward their own proposal to spare Medicare from spending cuts triggered by the August debt deal.
Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) introduced H.R. 3519, along with six other House Democrats, in a bid to exempt Medicare. Towns said Wednesday that hospitals would not be able to cope with reduced Medicare reimbursements required under the sequestration cuts required under the Budget Control Act.
“Hospitals in New York are already slated to experience $15 billion in Medicare and Medicaid cuts under the Affordable Care Act over the next ten years,” Towns said. “If sequestration occurs, hospitals will lose another $2.6 billion — or over $116 million in my district alone.
“Cuts like these will severely harm patient access to care and undermine an employment base that supports over 700,000 jobs in New York State,” he said. “We simply cannot balance the nation’s budget on the backs of seniors, while simultaneously harming jobs.”
The Budget Control Act requires $1.2 trillion in cuts to planned spending after the deficit-reduction supercommittee failed to agree on cuts by their Nov. 23 deadline. About $600 billion of those cuts are slated to come from defense spending, and another $600 billion are required from social programs like Medicare.
The law specifies that Medicare can be cut no more than 2 percent for a fiscal year, a cut of about $123 billion over a decade. However, Towns’s bill would change that to say there can be no reduction at all for Medicare.
Other sponsors of Towns’s bill are Reps. André Carson (D-Ind.), Lacy Clay (D-Mo.), Colleen Hanabusa (D-Hawaii), Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.) and Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Del. Donna Christensen (D-Virgin Islands).
Another group of Democrats, led by Reps. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), Jim Himes (D-Conn.) and George Miller (D-Calif.), are preparing a letter urging President Obama to ensure that the sequestration process is allowed to happen. Obama has said he believes the triggered cuts — which were created as an incentive to pass a deal — must be allowed to happen, and these Democrats agree that Congress should not be allowed to back away from the cuts.
50% of bankruptcies are connected to medical bills that medical insurance providers refused to cover. Yes working people with medical insurance.
There are close to 70 million uninsured as we speak. Open up IMPROVED Medicare Single Payer insurance and bring them on. Their tax dollars alone would support a Medicare single payer system. Plus senior citizens would participate. Now there are plenty of tax dollars to support Improved Medicare Single Payer Insurance.
The 70 million or more uninsured are not with any medical insurance company and the industry is raking in profits. The industry does not want the uninsured or the senior citizen population.
Moreover, tax dollars also pay for critical elements of the health care system apart from direct care—Medicare funds much of the expensive equipment hospitals use, for instance, along with all medical residencies.
Open the IMPROVED Medicare Single Payer Insurance door wide to all who want to switch. In america trillions of tax dollars are collected annually. So everybody in the USA is paying taxes somehow let’s not play pretend.
Considering 50-70 million are not connected to any insurance venue why not redesign medicare into a single payer device at a much lower rate? Plus mandate all federal employees accept this insurance.
Problems solved and the insurance industry still has its’ core group of consumers.