Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan claim that President Obama is destroying Medicare by “stealing $700 billion” from the program. That’s bunk, says Robert Reich. In his August 13 blog post, Reich cuts through the bull and shows precisely how different the Ryan-Romney plan is from President Obama’s approach.
The big difference, though, is the Affordable Care Act achieves these savings by reducing Medicare payments to drug companies, hospitals, and other providers rather than cutting payments to Medicare beneficiaries.
The Romney-Ryan plan, by contrast, achieves its savings by turning Medicare into a voucher whose value doesn’t keep up with expected increases in healthcare costs — thereby shifting the burden onto Medicare beneficiaries, who will have to pay an average of $6,500 a year more for their Medicare insurance, according an analysis of the Republican plan by the Congressional Budget Office.