Fix Health Care Policy

SLIDESHOW: Obamacare’s Impact—in Pictures

As health care becomes an increasingly debated topic, it is critically important for every American to understand the impact of Obamacare. The Heritage Foundation’s newly updated “Obamacare in Pictures: Visualizing the Effects of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” shows through charts and graphs Obamacare’s far-reaching negative effects on all Americans. (continues below slideshow)

 Obamacare in Pictures: Visualizing the Effects of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act from The Heritage Foundation

Here are a few examples of what the chart series depicts:

• Obamacare’s cuts to Medicare. Obamacare cut $716 billion out of the Medicare program to pay for new spending in Obamacare. These cuts come from Medicare Advantage, hospice services, nursing homes, and more. Taking this money out of Medicare will have serious implications on seniors’ ability to access care. For instance, the Medicare Actuary predicts that by 2017, 50 percent of the seniors enrolled in Medicare Advantage—7.4 million—will have to leave their private plans and move into traditional Medicare—which offers less generous benefits, no cap on catastrophic costs, and separate plans for drug coverage.

Read the rest on The Foundry…

Tags: Affordable Care Act, impact, Medicare Advantage, Medicare cuts, Obamacare in Pictures, slideshow

Pictures of America’s Medicare Mess

Earlier this month, President Barack Obama sat down with world leaders at the G8 summit and bragged about his track record of supposed good governance — how he has worked to “bring down our deficits and debt over the longer term” and made “room to take a balanced approach to reducing our deficit and debt.” There are plenty of ways to shoot holes in the president’s pronouncement, but there is one glaring example of where he has come up far short — failing to address America’s growing Medicare crisis.

In “Medicare at Risk: Visualizing the Need for Reform,” Heritage’s Kathryn Nix and John Fleming illustrate the facts about Medicare and why Washington must come to the rescue with innovative solutions to preserve the program today and into the future.

President Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law in 1965, creating a program that today provides health insurance to some 48 million Americans. Now, though, that program is in desperate need of reform as the United States grapples with retiring baby boomers entering the system, increasing health care costs and a status quo that simply can’t be sustained.

Read the rest on The Foundry…

Tags: charts, Medicare at risk, Medicare crisis, need for reform, slideshow

Medicare at Risk: Visualizing the Need for Reform

Heritage’s new chart series, “Medicare at Risk: Visualizing the Need for Reform,” shows that, without the necessary structural reform, Medicare’s finances will have devastating consequences on the federal budget, not to mention taxpayers and seniors alike.

Medicare’s Impact on the Budget. Medicare spending is rising faster than any other part of the federal budget, and it’s a major driver of runaway deficit spending in the not-so-distant future. Retiring baby boomers and rising health care costs will cause Medicare’s shortfall to contribute to 81 percent of federal deficits by 2040. Clearly, the federal deficit cannot be contained without addressing Medicare’s structural problems.

Medicare’s Impact on Taxpayers. Medicare spending isn’t just busting the federal budget; its also consuming more of household budgets. In 1970, average Medicare spending per American household was $129. In 2021—just nine years from now—spending per household will be a whopping $7,987. Unless there is significant reform to deal with these rising costs, Americans will be faced with automatic benefit cuts or steep tax increases. The Medicare Part A payroll tax would have to increase by 84 percent just to make Part A alone solvent.

Read the rest on The Foundry…

Tags: budget, charts, debt, economy, impact, Medicare at risk, slideshow, taxpayers