No, the cuts to Medicare in Obamacare are likely to be reductions in hospital reimbursement or something similar, not cuts in benefits. (or as your TPM link puts it, "The Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB, may only propose cuts to providers, not beneficiaries. ") Because that totally makes economic sense, that you can just keep paying less and less for the same services without any consequences! Apparently that's not the kind of cuts we should worry about, that's "slowing the growth".
Nobody who actually thinks about it for a long time can possibly believe that Medicare can stay the way it is longterm without big changes in the way we fund it. Fundamentally, either that means raising taxes or cutting service. "Medicare as we know it" is an unsustainable, ever-growing beast. It's a service that does a great amount of good for a lot of people, but its costs are a problem that both thinking Democrats and thinking Republicans have to acknowledge.
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Date: 2012-08-14 02:13 pm (UTC)Nobody who actually thinks about it for a long time can possibly believe that Medicare can stay the way it is longterm without big changes in the way we fund it. Fundamentally, either that means raising taxes or cutting service. "Medicare as we know it" is an unsustainable, ever-growing beast. It's a service that does a great amount of good for a lot of people, but its costs are a problem that both thinking Democrats and thinking Republicans have to acknowledge.