The New York Times has the article Patients Would Pay More if Romney Restores Medicare Savings, Analysts Say.

Some of the wording in this article had me confused, but the bottom line is that Romney’s false claims about what Obama has done to Medicare revolve around Medicare Advantage as I have been saying in many blog posts.

But Medicare Advantage, which was created 15 years ago in the hope that private-market competition for beneficiaries would result in lower prices, has consistently cost more than standard Medicare — costs that Medicare beneficiaries must help subsidize through their premiums.

The reductions for Medicare Advantage providers are “a matter of basic fairness because they’ve been overpaid for years,” Ms. Moon said. As for beneficiaries, she added, “they’re guaranteed basic Medicare benefits. They may lose some extra benefits they may have been getting, but in effect you’re saying some of the windfall benefits may go away.”

“The bottom line,” said Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee, which Mr. Ryan leads, “is that Romney is proposing to take more money from seniors in higher premiums and co-pays and hand it over to private insurance companies and other providers in the Medicare system.”

As a subscriber to Medicare Advantage since I turned 65 about 3 years ago, I have always realized that it was a waste of government money to subsidize insurance companies this way, but if we were paying for it anyway, I might as well use it.  I won’t be sorry to see it go, especially if the savings in my Medicare premiums allow me to buy the miniscule extra benefits on my own.

The post on New Economic Perspectives comes in two parts. Part 1 – Is an Anti-Austerity Alliance of Left Neo-classicals and Post-Keynesians Possible? Is it Desirable? and Part 2 – Is an Anti-Austerity Alliance of Left Neo-classicals and Post-Keynesians Possible? Is it Desirable?

From part 1 is this excerpt:

The advice of MMTers to progressives is to prioritize what government should spend money on and put forward those demands without linking them to the amount of taxes collected in countries that control their own currencies such as the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Japan and China. Secondarily, some in MMT might suggest using taxation as a means for shaping economic behavior and regulating economic inequality, uses of taxation which are considered commonsensical among economists of most schools and political tendencies.

These posts are like a Russian novel. It is hard to keep all the players straight between their atual names and the categories the author puts them in. Also like Russian novels, the post is worth reading if you are really interested in the topic.

A little bit of clarification emerged for me when I read this excerpt from part 2.

The non-economist progressive public sphere, such as it is, is in awe of Paul Krugman but Post-Keynesians and MMTers continue to find critical flaws in his reasoning and model of how the economy works.
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An example of reality vs. unreality and stakes involved revolves around widely divergent theories of banking, debt and loaning money. Critically important in this era of politically overpowerful, mega-banks devoted to casino-like speculation on asset prices, is an understanding of what banks actually are and how they might be regulated or transformed to serve the greater good. The largely Post-Keynesian theory of endogenous money supported by a set of empirical observations of how banks and credit-creation works, suggests that banks create money by lending it and that lending occurs independent of reserves in the bank. Banks have social “license” to lend and use it when they see the potential for profit and loan amounts are not drawn on money in their accounts but the loans create money.  This license is a source of political and economic power, enabling banks to drive and shape the economy and the amount of money in circulation by lending or not lending as the case may be.    Neoclassicals of the Left and Right deny that this license exists and instead see lending as driven by reserves, a crude “piggybank” model of bank lending with bankers as transparent intermediaries.  Krugman and other have started to equivocate on this matter but still do not accept that changes in credit/debt add to or subtract from aggregate demand overall.

Perhaps the biggest value to me of my having posted this is to provide me with a reminder to go back and reread the original posts, try to understand some of the complicated sentences better, and follow up on the many links in the articles.

If you can’t convince people with facts, maybe a little humor will do the trick.

The press release Elizabeth Warren: GOP Agenda for Women Not Just Wrong, It’s Dangerous on the Warren web site seems to be the source for the words in the image below.

Although the image above looks official, I cannot find it on the Warren web site.