{"id":12061,"date":"2012-08-21T21:04:26","date_gmt":"2012-08-22T02:04:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=12061"},"modified":"2012-08-21T21:06:49","modified_gmt":"2012-08-22T02:06:49","slug":"patients-would-pay-more-if-romney-restores-medicare-savings-analysts-say","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2012\/08\/21\/patients-would-pay-more-if-romney-restores-medicare-savings-analysts-say\/","title":{"rendered":"Patients Would Pay More if Romney Restores Medicare Savings, Analysts Say"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>The New York Times<\/em> has the article <a title=\"The New York Times article\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/08\/22\/us\/politics\/costs-seen-in-romneys-medicare-savings-plan.html?pagewanted=all\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Patients Would Pay More if Romney Restores Medicare Savings, Analysts Say<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Some of the wording in this article had me confused, but the bottom line is that Romney&#8217;s false claims about what Obama has done to Medicare revolve around Medicare Advantage as I have been saying in many blog posts.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>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 \u2014 costs that Medicare beneficiaries must help subsidize through their premiums.<\/p>\n<p>The reductions for Medicare Advantage providers are \u201ca matter of basic fairness because they\u2019ve been overpaid for years,\u201d Ms. Moon said. As for beneficiaries, she added, \u201cthey\u2019re guaranteed basic Medicare benefits. They may lose some extra benefits they may have been getting, but in effect you\u2019re saying some of the windfall benefits may go away.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe bottom line,\u201d said Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee, which Mr. Ryan leads, \u201cis 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.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>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.\u00a0 I won&#8217;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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;s false claims about what Obama has done to Medicare revolve around Medicare Advantage as I have been saying in many [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-12061","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12061"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12061\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12063,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12061\/revisions\/12063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}