Democrats' health plan would reduce Medicare

As health-care reform lurches forward in Washington, proposed legislation would chop nearly half a trillion dollars from Medicare. This is yet another example of greedy, cold-hearted, racist Republicans slicing Medicare so they can laugh as Granny shivers on a subway grate and nibbles her cat food with a broken fork.

Just as candidate Barack Obama warned last October, Republican rule means Medicare cuts. "You'll pay more for your drugs," Obama prophesied. "You'll get lower-quality care. I don't think that's right. In fact, it ain't right."

But wait ...

These massive Medicare cuts bear no Republican fingerprints. They are — gasp! — handcrafted by Democrats, the heretofore compassionate, caring party that handed Granny her knitting needles and hot cocoa as she rocked gently before a crackling, federally subsidized fire.

Democrats now are so desperate to infiltrate Uncle Sam deeper into our clinics and hospitals that they are behaving even worse than these Republican caricatures. They are throwing Granny under the bus, backing over her and then burning rubber across the splinters of her rocking chair.

Specifically, the various Democratic bills under consideration would fund a massive explosion in federal health-care expenditures by extracting some $450 billion from Medicare's budget through 2019.

This includes "hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and fraud" that Obama breezily says can be trimmed from Medicare — just like that. If Medicare truly is this mismanaged, then government-dominated medicine is a model to avoid. If, however, government medicine efficiently lowers costs, Medicare should lack such budgetary blubber, leaving little to excise.

Which is it?

Democrats want to squeeze $113 billion from the Medicare Advantage program that satisfies 10 million seniors. Democrats also would slash Medicare reimbursements to doctors who see elderly patients. Medicare typically pays such physicians 80 cents per dollar of their usual prices. Curb those payments by another 25 percent, as the Senate Finance Committee recommends, and doctors will see even fewer Medicare patients. Likewise, if grocers earned only 60 cents on each dollar of food sold to seniors, Granny soon would be unwelcome at supermarkets.

Had the GOP mulled even a fraction of these cuts, Republican National Headquarters would be a smoking ruin. GOP members of Congress would be clad in Kevlar. And Republicans nationwide would be excoriated for geronticide.