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<\/a>, Reich cuts through the bull and shows precisely how different the Ryan-Romney plan is from President Obama’s approach.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The Romney-Ryan plan, by contrast, achieves its savings by turning Medicare into a voucher whose value doesn\u2019t keep up with expected increases in healthcare costs \u2014 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\u00a0 analysis of the Republican plan by the Congressional Budget Office. <\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":17374,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,113,10],"tags":[193,1070,1499],"yoast_head":"\n