Lawmakers Balk at Medicare Cuts While Harsh Future Choices

[Judi Lynn]

Lawmakers Balk at Medicare Cuts While Harsh Future Choices Loom
Feb. 17 (Bloomberg) -- When President George W. Bush proposed reducing Medicare costs by $36 billion over five years this month, even some Republican lawmakers said the cut was too big to get through Congress.

Yet the reduction would equal just 1.6 percent of the program's projected spending for that period, wouldn't even offset next year's increase in expenditures -- and would be dwarfed by spending the Congressional Budget Office projects will grow by $50 billion annually within seven years.

Medicare's soaring expenses -- driven by increasing health- care costs, a flood of retiring Baby Boomers and the program's new prescription drug benefit -- will soon present lawmakers with an unpalatable choice, said Bob Bixby, head of the Concord Coalition, a Washington-based group that advocates a balanced federal budget.

``We need to start confronting the choices of either raising taxes or cutting back the benefits,'' he said.
(snip/...)

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=aElVMPpcE9TI&refer=us

[salin]

1. meanwhile - bush's "health care reforms" will do NOTHING

to curb the sky-rocketing health costs (driven by pharma and ins. companies), and the administration has escalated costs with a ill-formed (policy wise) prescription benefit that harms many (who had coverage and have lost it - as in retiree programs that dropped it telling folks to get Plan D instead) and costs far too much for the benefit given (due to its giveaway to pharma structure).

[rodeodance]

2. these band-aid approaches do little--maybe for few only -over time.

[salin]

3. Ironically

the GOP will be their own undoing (the party per the party's power). Wallet hitting policies eventually make converts more than any "culture war" issue; and the GOP has passed so many egregious policies that are starting to hit millions straight in the pocketbook from many different directions.

[mike_c]

4. or stop dumping TRILLIONS into the Pentagon budget....

This is one of the wealthiest nations in the world, yet we have trouble providing services for our citizens that many far less prosperous nations provide as a matter of course. They also spent MUCH less of there revenues on military expenditures.