Cuts to Medicare ? Not the whole truth .

The national health care reform law  made several changes to Medicare, which makes up roughly 12 percent of the federal budget.

In a few cases, the law actually increased Medicare spending to provide more benefits and coverage, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a trusted independent source that analyzes the health care system. For instance, the health care law added money to cover prevention services and to fill a gap for enrollees who purchase prescription drugs through the Medicare Part D program. (That coverage gap is often referred to as the doughnut hole.)

Other parts of the law are intended to reduce future growth in Medicare spending, to encourage more efficiency and to improve the delivery and quality of care. (An example is paying hospitals less when patients are quickly re-admitted to hospitals after being discharged, to prevent people from being discharged too soon.) This practice happens all thr time. I happened to me after my neck surgery. I told them I knew somethinfg was wrong and had to be readdmitted one week later.

The bill doesn't take money out of the current Medicare budget but, rather, it attempts to slow the program's future growth, curtailing just over $500 billion in anticipated spending increases over the next 10 years. Medicare spending will still increase, however. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects Medicare spending will reach $929 billion in 2020, up from $499 billion in actual spending in 2009.

So while the health care law reduces the amount of future spending growth in Medicare, the law doesn't cut current funding for Medicare.


Bachmann and other Republican candidates say that, "We know that President Obama stole over $500 billion out of Medicare to switch it over to Obamacare.


We need to hold our news reporters to a higher standard - to report the information needed for voters to make an informed decision.  Now, they mostly act like handicappers trying to predict the outcome of horse races.  If there is anything of value being mentioned in news reports, it gets obscured, pushing most voters away and who then fall back on the catchy slogans and glitzy hype, and worse, the smear tactics honed to a razor's edge by the current Republican machine. I am sorry but our media needs to stop candidates in their tracts when they tell lies and untruths about issues like Medicare.