Mitt's already plotting Medicare's demise.
There's a reason Paul Ryan included the same cuts to service providers in the Medicare system in his budget that were in the Affordable Care Act. Ryan cribbed them because they helped his numbers and gave him more room for massive tax cuts for the wealthy. The ACA includes them because they slow the rate of growth in Medicare costs and extend the life of the program's trust fund. Which creates a
problem for a potential President Romney, who insists he'll restore the cuts Ryan and President Obama use.
Obama's cuts also extended the life of Medicare's giant trust fund, and by repealing them Romney would move the insolvency date of the program closer, toward the end of what would be his first term in office.
Instead of running out of money in 2024, Medicare says its trust fund for inpatient care would go broke in 2016 without the cuts. That could leave a President Romney little political breathing room to finalize his own Medicare plan. [...]
Romney would "have to find other ways to get the cost down in the future," said economist Marilyn Moon, a former trustee overseeing Social Security and Medicare finances.
"These (Obama cuts) were all on service providers," said Moon, now director of the health program at the nonpartisan American Institutes for Research. Romney "would have three options: either cut it out of providers in a different way, ask beneficiaries to pay higher premiums in various ways, or raise taxes in order to pay for it."
It doesn't take a lot of imagination to determine which route Romney would go, since the Romney/Ryan plan means cuts to beneficiaries already. But since Romney's and Ryan's primary goal is the end of Medicare altogether, that's a feature rather than a bug.