Mitt Romney wants you to think repealing Obamacare won't hurt. He's lying.
We
counted the ways in which Mitt Romney lied about President Obama's Medicare plan. Let's take a look at his
raft of lies about his own plans.
What I support is no change for current retirees and near-retirees to Medicare and the president supports taking $716 billion out of that program. [...]
Yeah, that's a lie. Probably the biggest. By repealing Obamacare, Romney would hurt current retirees in a number of ways: seniors would again have to co-pay for preventive health services that are now free; the prescription drug donut hole would open back up, exposing some seniors to much higher drug costs; "restoring" the $716 billion in provider cuts under Obamacare would make Medicare—which current retirees are relying on—insolvent in just four years.
Number two is for people coming along that are young. What I’d do to make sure that we can keep Medicare in place for them is to allow them either to choose the current Medicare program or a private plan -- their choice. They get to -- and they’ll have at least two plans that will be entirely at no cost to them. So they don’t have to pay additional money, no additional $6,000. That’s not going to happen. [...]
Okay, maybe
this one is the biggest. That's his voucher program. If you take a Romneyesque approach to the truth, you could call that one partially true, because
analysis of the Romney/Ryan plan—the current plan—says that people retiring in 2023 will only have to pay an additional $3,200. But from there on? Yikes.
And by the way, if the government can be as efficient as the private sector and offer premiums that are as low as the private sector, people will be happy to get traditional Medicare, or they’ll be able to get a private plan.
How about we survey Medicare beneficiaries and ask them if they'd rather be back in the private insurance market? In the meantime, I'll let
Health Affairs answer that one: "[N]on-partisan data from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) demonstrate definitively that private insurance is increasingly less efficient than Medicare."
MThe other thing we have to do to save Medicare, we have to have the benefits high for those that are low-income, but for higher-income people, we’re going to have to lower some of the benefits.
That's means-testing, and, as demonstrated above, any and every future retiree is going to be paying more under Romney's plan, no matter what their income.
Number three, it puts in place an unelected board that’s going to tell people, ultimately, what kind of treatments they can have. I don’t like that idea.
President Obama and the Congress didn't like that idea, either. That's why the Affordable Care Act
explicitly prohibits the board from cutting benefits for people on Medicare. It also contains nothing, not a single provision, "that empowers the advisory board to make any decisions about what treatments doctors may provide for their patients."
There's a reason Romney lied through his teeth about what his plan would do. It's because swing state voters hate it. It's tanking his entire campaign. His only option is to lie about it.
