Last March I wrote a piece for the American Thinker about the Democrat plan to gut Medicare Advantage, a market-based program very popular with poor and minority seniors. And it is still part of the congressional “reform” agenda to herd 10 million seniors off their MA plans and back to the more expensive and less comprehensive coverage of traditional Medicare.
But it turns out that this was just the opening raid of the Democrat war on seniors. Another budgetary blitzkrieg involves home health care. At present, Medicare’s home health benefit allows many seniors to receive care without going to community hospitals and nursing homes. According to the NYT, the Dems plan to “save money” by cutting that program:
The House bill would slice $55 billion over 10 years from projected Medicare spending on home health services, while the Senate bill would take $43 billion.
And it gets worse:
Home care would absorb a disproportionate share of the cuts. It currently accounts for 3.7 percent of the Medicare budget, but would absorb 10.2 percent of the savings squeezed from Medicare by the House bill and 9.4 percent of savings in the Senate bill.
But the Dems aren’t through with Granny yet. The “reformers” have their Nordan sights trained on Medicare Part-D. Tom Scully, a former CMS administrator, writes in the WSJ that Congress is about to drop a smart-bomb on an important component of that program. And the collateral damage will be Granny’s Medicare drug benefits:
There is a little-noticed provision buried deep in both the House and Senate health-care reform bills that … will hurt millions of seniors, impose new costs on taxpayers, and charge employers millions in new taxes.
This one’s a little complicated, involving a rather Byzantine combination of subsidies and tax incentives, but the bottom line is that Granny is looking at a big fat “incoming.” To stretch the metaphor to the breaking point, by the time the President and Congress get finished with her, Granny is going to look like Dresden in 1945.
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