I just added 2+2 and got 4. The Medicare re-imbursement cuts+ the Defict Commission

Please follow along.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7374320
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=433&topic_id=106491
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=433&topic_id=106491

1st link - Some doctors stop taking Medicare because re-imbursements too low
2nd link- Prediction that Medicare will die as more and more doctors will stop taking re-imbursements
3rd link - Congress causes Medicare re-imbursements to go even LOWER than they were when doctors first started rejecting them

The fourth link, that doesn't exist yet will be the Deficit Commission cutting Medicare re-imbursements or access even lower for the final nail in the coffin.

Now, please bear in mind that right there in our very own White House sits Zeke Emmanual of whom not much has been heard lately. Also bear in mind that Zeke Emmanual has long been for a system where Medicare was dismantled and replaced with, are you ready for it? - VOUCHERS!

As goes education, so will go Medicare and most likely Social Security which will also go the dismantlement and forced investments in mutual funds a la our forced purchase of for-profit insurance.

I now can plainly see that the foresworn goals of the Obama Adminstration were and are to dismantle and privatize public education, healthcare, Medicare and Social Security. If you can't see this, you just can't add.

But wall street will be happy.

in his ideas during the televised meeting with Republicans a few months back. I stated many times during the debate on HCR that the bill, as it emerged in the Senate, contained the seeds of the destruction and privatization of Medicare.

K&R

Some days, I wonder why I still care.

I seem to have stopped going to local Party meetings--not as a conscious choice, but...

The corporate ownership of America is becoming plainer every day. I see little but empty talk for the poor and middle classes, while this Democratic Administration advances the interests of the rich.

We can't even manage to extend unemployment benefits. Hell, what we need is a lot more than unemployment benefits. We need a national public works program to build our infrastructure. Light rail, Internet everywhere, etc. We could do it, but we're saddled by our adherence to capitalism with all its inefficiencies.

Oh, yeah, I was kind of counting on Medicare now that I'm 65. But what the hell? Insurance executives gotta live too.

I have only 9 months to go till I can receive Medicare. After not having seen a doctor for years, I am really REALLY counting on it!
This is most discouraging. Not at all what I had in mind when I voted in Nov 2008.

A dirty little secret that no one wants to acknowledge is the FACT that many MANY doctors will not take Medicare patients, especially if they only have Medicare. When I first got Medicare years ago I looked for a doctor in my area (lived in the San Fernando Valley in LA) and there was not a single doctor in my area that would take it. Not ONE. All the doctors that would take it were in LA proper, which meant a long drive in crazy traffic. Being on a limited income and then having to travel to see a doctor was insane.

I lucked out, because DH got a job with insurance, and the doctors fell over themselves to take me on as a patient when that happened. They always billed my insurance, and told me they were billing Medicare as a secondary - but they RARELY billed Medicare at all. I did not know at the time that if they did bill Medicare I would receive print outs of what was billed, and how much they paid out, etc.

As you know you will be getting on it - be prepared. And don't be surprised if you find that you don't have a whole lot of choices if Medicare is your only insurance.

Things may have gotten better with the advent of the supplemental programs. I do hope you have better luck than I did.

sheesh, this is so awful! for a country this large and prosperous to be SO dysfunctional and in such an unbelievable mess. There is no reason at ALL, here in the USA, that anybody should be hungry, homeless, or without medical care. None whatsoever. The destruction that has occurred over the last 20-30 years, esp. within the last 10 years, is obscene.

I live north of Atlanta now and have had doctors that actually do bill Medicare. I just checked where you post from, and you may very well find good doctors there (used to live in Me and docs there are old school lol) - but it never hurts to know the landscape you'll be dealing with in advance.

I really don't want to be negative about it, but so many people think Medicare is the Holy Grail - it's not. Now if we had doctors who were not *bottom-lining* patients, who were actually INTERESTED in their patients' problems rather than their personal wealth - Medicare could be a good thing to build up from. Doing your homework in advance will prepare you for the good, the bad, and the ugly. Don't know about you, but I can deal with problems with a little warning. Especially if I know I'm going to have to be creative.

And don't be shy about going to your county health department to get help before medicare kicks in. They may have programs that can help you with problems for free, or low cost. Heck, your tax dollars pay for those programs -- make use of them.

Sorry if I scared you -- didn't mean to do that. But forewarned is forearmed.

for those of us who live in L.A. It's the only way that we can get sure access to doctors. We have to pay extra for it.

Doctors are upset about the pay cut. Their pay should not have been cut. If Obama really spoke out about these cuts, Congress would pass the bill to restore the doctors' pay.

He could do the right thing if he wanted to.

He could raise the taxes on the wealthiest people if he wanted to. The CEOs and the Wall Streeters with their millions are still getting the same or more pay than they got a few years ago. An awful lot of other people have suffered pay-cuts.

:grr:

please take the time to read the whole article

edit to add link

as he complains about entitlement propgrams for the "little people"

Which is why I've never been a supporter. :(

After all, they serve the same masters.

I was never an Obama fan, but even I didn't think he'd suck this badly.

And I can absolutely see it happening. They already know how to get vouchers passed.

Well I guess some things are best safer compliant forgotten better unsaid, so I think in the end we as a nation are going to have to learn to byte the bullet and learn how not to spend money on the poor, which will be most of us, and be glad that republicans are not in control...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x8638569

Here's a 2003 transcript of a transcript of Peterson with Bill Moyers
http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_peterson.html

He evades a question about the Bush tax cut for the wealthy, catapults the propaganda about "the children! the children!" that has been so effective with Tea Baggers then goes on to extoll Margaret Thatcher, and then suggests 73 be the new age to receieve SS benfits.

The problem is, I didn't vote for Bush.

Bush1 tried, but there was no way the traditional Dems were going to go for that. Had to get someone in there that would allow the people to let their guard down.
Bush2 tried to privatize SS, but got nowhere. Maybe 'they' need another Dem to get this done.

Salesmen and cons. That is the type of government we have now.

but I call them carnys and rubes. Guess who the electorate is?

And i was sick over it because the economy has steadily been getting worse, wages went down, and jobs flooded out to other countries after NAFTA. Just as i'd feared.

system in this - unlike schools which are public and would be replaced with tax dollar funded vouchers to private companies - Dr's are already paid with tax dollars even though they are private individuals and companies.

Just guessing. Another lovely step towards Bush's dream of the (you're on your)own(ership) society.

Of course that only applies as long as they get theirs. Locally most of the freepers are against spending money for anything unless they personally benefit from it somehow.

Vouchers are a constant Republican wet dream - take public funds, and convert them to monopoly dollars that you use in the private marketplace, a private marketplace that is hopefully devoid of government oversight and pesky regulation. Get those tax dollars on private hands!!

They are falling like dominos. Education. Healthcare. Medicare. Social Security. All in line to be privatized.

The following is what I meant the OP to be. Please read the 3 links in sequence and you can see much more clearly the chain of actions.



My edit window is over or I would have just corrected the OP.

quality of life.

My father was in the original Gray Panthers that fought in the 70s to end mandatory retirement at 65 (I learned recently that the GPs are still a viable organization, and in fact they might be a valuable resource in this fight: http://www.graypanthers.org/ )--anyway, because he aged during that era after WWII when true progress was made, and he had access to medical care, he is in quite good health now, though frail.

I have become a fanatic about nutrition and fitness, trying to stay as healthy as I can with no medical care (I'm self-employed and just do not have insurance). I know there is a community clinic not too far from me with a sliding-scale fee, so it's not totally hopeless, at least there is that...

Not for us. We'll be working til we die.

Like you said, only if you're very lucky.

quite effectively. Of course, once things fall apart so much that they can no longer deny that it is, it will just be another of those "nobody could've predicted" moments and casually swept aside.
:kick: & R

ETA; for spelling.

behind the scenes.

So...if the rumour that Rahm is leaving--I can give three guesses and the first two don't count of where he is going and what he is going to do.
His work in Washington is done. Time to reap the profits in the private sector.

/sarcasmo

Adding some quotes from your link:

It is set to decrease by 30 percent by Jan 2011. Husband did not get a single medicare check the first three weeks of June for patients he had seen. We had to go into our emergency fund and almost deplete it to make the mortgage and payroll on time. He is a family doc in a solo practice.
They just kicked the can down the road a little longer.

Most people won't know this and won't follow it.

Life expectancy will go way down for most Americans.

(emphasis added)

in a way that attacks our fiscal problems without punishing our hard-working doctors or endangering the benefits on which so many of our seniors rely."

Right. It's the people he has assigned to do the reforming that I'm afraid of.

I remember on this board someone telling me that HCR was incremental. LOL! There was nothing incremental about it; the word "incremental" was used to keep single payer advocates quiet. What would have been "incremental" would have been extending Medicare bit by bit over 20 years until everyone was covered.

HCR, however, was the exact OPPOSITE of incremental: it was radical, and it created an entirely NEW, for-profit system that mandated everyone buy health insurance (from a badly corrupted industry) with few if any cost controls and NO real reform of the industry. Loopholes abound, and the industry is already fighting on many fronts to interpret the bill in a way that is profitable to them and an absolute disaster to real people. The broke state governments (and this is where the fight will be since insurance is still regulated by the states) cannot afford to take them on.

I remember saying at the time that one of the real purposes of this radical new system was to create the privatized alternative to Medicare so that Medicare could be destroyed entirely. I foresaw them dumping Medicare recipients (boomers and younger) onto this pay for play system. However, getting people off of Medicare would cause great havoc and rage: any radical change that people know about does produce an equally radical reaction. So, what they are doing is bit by bit impoverishing Medicare so badly that the elderly will be forced to get private insurance, bit by bit. You see, the destruction of Medicare actually IS incremental. The creation of the new insurance monstrosity was not.

I consider it like any PR page of any company and assess the same value to it.

The OP is based on the premise that the administration supports Medicare reimbursement cuts. That's obviously not the case.

Also, fixing the formula permanently is intended to address exactly this situation. The administration has also proposed increasing payroll taxes on the wealthy for both Social Security and Medicare.

As for the commisssion, it can only make recommendations. Nothing it proposes can be enacted with out Congressional approval.

You just did that.

Honestly a great deal of that OP, in my opinion, sounded like a forward I might get from some of my right-wing coworkers (I live in a very red county). The big talking point from them in regards to health care reform has been that it's going to get rid of Medicare.

Now, I'm a bit of a radical in this. My ex-husband went to medical school abroad and came here to practice because he would have a higher standard of living than if he practiced in his native Germany. But his mom, who either had really bad genes in regards to cancer or was exposed to fallout from Chernobyl or some other environmental factor, survived cervical cancer, uterine cancer, and breast cancer because of the German healthcare system (she died of ovarian cancer -- she wanted to keep her ovaries to avoid hormones... le sigh.) Their elderly are well taken care of. Being a doctor isn't nearly as remunerative there as it is here, but they elected to put an effective safety net ahead of their doctors driving Lamborghinis. Back when Medicare was first put into place, doctors made house calls and lived about as well as salespeople (my grandfather, who had a merchantile business where he went door-to-door in poorer parts of town selling household items and appliances on credit, made more than the doctor who came to examine my mother when they thought she had scarlet fever as a child -- it was actually measles.)

I would rather either see Medicare completely removed and a single-payer system put in its place, or Medicare and Medicaid expanded to cover everyone. But that is going to mean that in order to cover everyone doctors WILL take pay cuts. There's no way to avoid that. Health care costs are skyrocketing, and the only thing that is going to fix it is going to be across-the-board reform, from drug companies charging thousands of dollars a month for a pill that hardly costs that much to make, to doctors who are overcharging in comparison to others in their specialty, to insurance companies taking their slice of the pie by being the middle man, and let's not forget stricter penalties and enforcement for fraud.

Trying partial solutions is not the way this is going to work out.

they're essential to the doctor-patient relationship. lets give them the haircut and leave the doctors alone.

company in management makes more than my husband a family practice physician and he has benefits too.

... physicians who choose to go into family practice or rural practice are not the ones who I think should get cuts. You're right, they are not the ones driving fancy sports cars with foreign names. Sometimes I think they're the ones that decided to go to medical school to help people primarily instead of seeing dollar signs, because there aren't a lot of those dollars being given to GPs. We've got a glut of specialists in the field, but a serious shortage of GPs. My ex-hubby got matched into OB/GYN, his second choice over cardiology.

:tinfoilhat:

which he suggested in a sort of round-about way that the current generation of seniors is living too long. The Social Security system was set up when the average American lived less long than he does today, Alan Simpson complained.

These cuts to Medicare should help shorten a few inconvenient lives is what they are thinking. That is the way Republicans think.

,

Zeke Emanuel and Alan Simpson seem to think alike about the worth of seniors who live too long.

Demand That the Fiscal Commission Keep Social Security and Medicare Intact
Public Meeting & Public Feedback

http://www.fiscalcommission.gov/

The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform will hold a public hearing in the afternoon on June 30th in Washington, D.C., wherein the chairmen and commissioners will hear ideas from members of the public. If you or your organization would like an opportunity to be a part of this public forum, please send an email to commission@fc.eop.gov with the information below, and we will contact you as the date approaches.

1) Name
2) Will you be representing an organization?
3) If so, what organization will you be representing?
4) Email Address
5) Phone Number
6) Zip Code
7) Any additional information

Unfortunately, due to time and space constraints, we are not able to accommodate everyone. However, anyone can submit comments, ideas, and suggestions at anytime via email by contacting commission@fc.eop.gov. All comments received, including attachments and other supporting materials, are part of the public record.

Email comments to commission@fc.eop.gov
http://www.fiscalcommission.gov/

they are private citizens? My husband sees medicare patients, lots of them... and the pay has dropped so low that it is almost costing him to see them when expenses are taken into account. I am talking family practice which is reimbursed at the lowest rate here.

My best bud is in family practice. I've heard what it's like for years, Mojorabbit. I had a doctor who was also a friend who actually left medicine when another opportunity came her way. She was a truly great doctor too. Smart and caring.

That 21% cut could put many 'underwater' financially. No way to make it up from those who are privately insured, as they've done for years.

the goal of the policy is to make the program less effective and therefore less attractive and trusted, so it will be easier to cut.

There must be dems who are siding with the Republicans or what you're saying would not be possible.

The fact that they passed another band-aid which Nancy Pelosi herself calls "totally inadequate" does nothing to change that.

Your Medical net links just re-inforces that point:




To recap, due to the inability of Congress to pass a timely bill, shock waves rippled throughout the Medicare system which impacted both doctors and patients. Over 43 million Americans are covered by Medicare!! They passed a fix, but the damage was already done. The Congress passed a band-aid which ALL commentators deem inadequate. But IN THE MEANTIME, before the fix, we are reading coverage like this:


Yes, of course we can blame Republicans, but the same group of Democratic deficit hawks that join them consistently once again gummed up the works for a program that impacts 43 million Americans (which bears repeating).

If Harry Reid and the Democratic Senators were concerned about the actual well-being of the Medicare enrollees, they could have pulled the re-imbursement extension a lot earlier from the spending bill than they did. But they didn't. They played chicken with the Republicans over it. But guess what? Nancy Pelosi didn't even want him to do it when he did it! She was "surprised and irritated" according to the JournalStar editorial above.

And here we here we have her in a story below bashing the Senate fix that WAS passed! And recall, when she made these statements, people were ALREADY being turned away by physicians! 4 days later they pass the extension, criticizing it all the while, without even seeming to notice that actual people have their actual health and lives on the line here.



So you have BOTH the Senate Majority Leader and the Speaker of the House having a major hand in mishandling the re-imbursement extension. You can try to ignore that fact all you want, but that's the truth of it. So how is it that they are so divorced from the reality of daily life and how extremely important that extension was? I'll take anyone's answer that makes any sense.

get a single medicare payment for almost three weeks. Husband has a small solo practice with three employees. I had to take emergency money out of my credit union( this was my just in case hubby has to go to hospital savings, as he has no insurance due to a preexisting cond and not being able to buy any because of it at any price) so we could make payroll and pay our mortgage on time. My husband was stressed to the max. Maybe people in congress can go without a good part of their pay for three weeks but we can't. And yes if you read the doctor's message boards many are saying screw it, they are not going to take medicare patients after this mess which has been going on for the past three or four months.

"And yes if you read the doctor's message boards many are saying screw it, they are not going to take medicare patients after this mess which has been going on for the past three or four months."

There you have it, from the inside, exactly what I was saying. OUR Congress, the one headed by Dems, completely f!@ked over 43 million people with their handling of this issue. When they pulled the extension from the larger bill it passed "easily" in both Houses.

Now we are left with the bigger question of WHY did they mishandle it so badly? Are they unaware of the numbers of people who depend on Medicare? That doesn't seem logical. Did they just not care? I can see how that is possible, based on previous actions and inactions. Or did they just feel like screwing with Medicare? Maybe getting a number of doctors to drop the program will reduce the numbers and drop the deficits that we now have to cut in half in 3 years according to the G20. Does anyone really know?

My OP posited something rather bleak - that they could consciously be trying to destabilize or reduce Medicare in preparation for the gutting to come. Does it matter if their actions are conscious or unconscious if the same result is achieved?

I'm scare NOW too. We can barely hang onto our $10,000 each deductible, 70/30 BC/BS individual policies. These run us about $850 a month. Some months we've had to skip, then catch up later. I fear what might happen if we had to drop insurance. If either of us got a catastrophic illness. a hospital could take our house. Or even if we had insurance and couldn't meet the deductible/out of pocket.

That's how many people go bankrupt, I've read.

The healthcare bill didn't do anything about age based rates even though the mandate will give insurers a huge 'pool' of younger, healthier people.

He is absolutely correct, because it sort of sidesteps health care entirely.

Are are you only interested in negative links that further your thought, rather than the full story?

Just sayin'. Sometimes I read posts, hoping to be informed. I'm disappointed when I run across posts like this one that are just to scare and intimidate and don't present all the facts.

Reminds me of those many death panels stories we heard last year.

the medical insurance companies has tens of millions new customers that can`t afford to pay. and last but not least.. there`s way to many of us boomers that are a drag on the economy so we`ll have suck it up and die a few years earlier than we hoped.

"....there is no hope

no reasoning

this rainy day in june..."

It is not hard to see which way this seems to be drifting for Medicare eligible folks. Just another blow to the gut of seniors.

We already see 88 year old people who can barely move as greeters at WalMart, get ready for more unless we can break the vise grip of the corporate state.

How can we raise retirement ages if there are no jobs for that sector of the population in the first place?

I would bet on forced investments in US gov't bonds with penalties for any other investment. Maybe taxing 401K contributions upfront instead of at the back end.

The government is going to grab every dime they can.