Medicare was created for a reason. Private insurance providers are not capable of offering affordable comprehensive health care plans for seniors. By all estimates the Ryan voucher scheme is destined to fail. Obamacare's $700 billion in Medicare savings (reduced payments to providers and fewer subsidies to supplementary insurance providers) extends Medicare's solvency for 10 years while not reducing benefits. The idea is that this gives us time to find a long term solution.

If the Republicans are successful in repealing Obamacare it will immediately throw Medicare into insolvency and will create a crisis allowing them to further pursue privatization efforts which is their ultimate goal. Don't forget that Ryan was the architect of GWB's failed attempt to privatize Social Security.

How do I go about getting my bias spew published here on Patch? Clearly by this hack piece there is a shortage of honest, intelligent writers. I wouldn't think it very difficult to find a home grown straight shooting journalist but apparently so.
Hardly fish wrapping quality. Glad I didn't print it.
Rubbish!!!

Go to the home page and click on blogger posts and sign up! It's easy! Would love to have another conservative voice and two sided conversation. When conservatives post the facts, the liberals stay away I noticed. They only hash and rehash on what they write.

Unfortunately Senator Thompson, as with most lockstep Liberals, wouldn't know a fact if one slapped him in his face. His entire story is so full of democrat party talking points of mistruths that there isn't room for an intelligent discussion here.
We've seen 4 years of Obama change and our country has never been worse off! My vote is for anybody but incumbents.
Steve Rausch

I believe any "reforms" in medicare would simply result in cost shifts either to the physicians/providers in the form of lower payments, to the states in the form of unfunded medicaid liabilities (which is where senator thompson would feel it), or to the people in the form of reduced services and higher out of pocket costs.

The problem here is three fold:
1) People don't actually know how much healthcare costs.
2) Healthcare reform, like it or not, requires everyone to have it in order for the entire pool to get cheaper.
3) People are non compliant in their medications and therapies. If folks would just do what their doctor says, we would have reduced costs.

Harriet - you bring up an excellent point here. Before I adequately respond to your question, I need a few points of clarification:
1) Do you have insurance?
2) The $700 figure - would you say it's mostly office visit fees or tests?
3) Which tennant are you addressing with the problems I laid out? To me, since medicine is not a science, each doctor is going to have their own take on issues. You are bringing up a quality point, which is where justification for lower payments usually come from.

However, if you're misdiagnosed, is that malpractice? Are other tests wasteful?

Some great comments here. And by great I mean useless.

If you have issue with any of the points made by the author, point them out and provide non-partisan facts that dispute them. Comments like "Democrats can't save money", "this is hackery", "are you afraid of private sector competition?" is the best you can come up with? Come on, use the Google and make a real argument.

For example: Mitt Romney made this claim in an Aug. 15, 2012, one-on-one interview with Tampa Bay’s WTSP 10 News.

"Under the president's plan, he cuts Medicare by $716 billion, takes that money out of the Medicare trust fund and uses it to pay for Obamacare,"
"I think this is something that people are just now focused on and find it very, very difficult to understand why he would cut Medicare for our current seniors."

Mitt is not telling the truth here. If you want to understand the truth about the $700B in question and don't want to do a lot of reading of CBO reports there is a video available from the Kaiser Family Foundation at:

http://kaiseredu.org/tutorials/Medicare-and-health-reform/player.html

While I feel you should be doing your own research on these matters, here are a few articles to back up my points:
1) People don't actually know how much healthcare costs. (http://goo.gl/KvstI)
2) Healthcare reform, like it or not, requires everyone to have it in order for the entire pool to get cheaper. (Link: http://goo.gl/aKJKy)
3) People are non compliant in their medications and therapies. If folks would just do what their doctor says, we would have reduced costs. (Link: http://goo.gl/EolOv)

The state of Georgia has continued its march backwards. Our Governor,Nathan Deal, announced his intention not to insure 650,000 Georgians under Medicaid. Even though the federal government under the Affordable Health Care Act would have paid 100% the first year and 90% the second year. Deal has joined the other two right wing "DixieRepubs" governors in Florida and Texas in denying health care insurance to their citizens. Outrageous and disgusting.

@Larry Reid
Read todays paper...,this is medicaid not medicare.For the record,I Voted for Roy Barnes.I don't vote for crooks.

Couple of thoughts here. You bash the idea of vouchers because of the idea that medical care will get more expensive. This may be true, or may not. New technology could impact prices and drive them up, but it could just as easily have the opposite effect. Until that technology is presented, we don't really know. That being said, the cost effect would be the same either way - with us footing the entire bill like we do now, or using a true 'insurance' model like vouchers would do. Probably more so, actually, with us paying the entire amount.

Other thought, and I know this really chaps some people, but why do we automatically assume that once we become old we should never pay for anything again? We make all this noise about reducing Medicare for seniors, and Oh, How Will They Live? without ever asking the question about why we should keep paying for it at the levels we do. If there is an end to it at some point, it will encourage folks to make alternate arrangements for healthcare while they can. The voucher system works for me, makes sense.

What we need to do is retrain the American people to not rely on insurance as the end-all be-all of payments systems. Insurance is not supposed to cover 100% of your healthcare costs. Never was. Legislation forcing companies to cover more and more stuff just raises the prices....
Again,

@Karsten Torch
Medicare is not free, my parents paid in for years and they still pay a premium of $200.00 per month and because they don't have a Medicare supplemental plan some of their medical care is paid out of pocket.
You don't shop around for medical tests and procedures. gee doc I'll have to get three quotes on that before you proceed...this is not the real world.
What does private insurance do? They take your money, deduct 30% (now 20%)because of the Affordable Health Care Act and fight to not pay your provider(Medicare only cost about 3% to administer).
All this Republican bull about vouchers is all about helping big insurance companies.

High health costs are driven higher by Medicare. The Health Care Financeing Administration (HCFA pronounced HICK-fa) was created as a part of Pres. Johnson's war on poverty. Part of this brilliant plan has been price fixing and reduced payments to providers. As a result, the providers began to charge higher fees to everyone else in order to make payments on expensive educations, employeed, and equipment. You see, there is no free lunch--someone ends up having to pay for it!

Along with reduced payments for providers, the providers originally had to submit claims for payment on special forms with special coding system. Each doctor's office must pay for someone in their office to become a "medical billing expert" in order to learn how to properly code so payments are received. Then they must wait for payment. Then payment is denied, so they must re-submit using a different code, hoping they will finally be paid. Today payment must be submitted by computer in a special format. But government bureaucrats must justify their existence, so occasionally they change the coding system and the format for submitting the claims.

Provider payments are reduced, employees must be paid, costs to everyone else must go up. Everything government puts their finger into, they screw up! And the more intrusive government gets, the more screwed up it gets!

@John Cook
Insurance companies use the same standard form and do the same thing. A uniform system saves time and money in processing claims.What is the difference between a big insurance bureaucrat and a government bureaucrat? One is trying to maximize profits and pay high executive salaries and their investors.Which costs less to administer?

The private insurance costs less to administer. The thing about the government-run healthcare is that a lot of the costs are deferred off onto other programs. The IRS handles a lot of the work of Medicare, yet none of that winds up in the chart under administrative costs. You also have to keep in mind that those on Medicare, on average, spend far more on healthcare services in a year than others. They're older, and with them not controlling the purse strings, there's no shopping or self-control for treatments.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/aroy/2011/06/30/the-myth-of-medicares-low-administrative-costs/
http://www.medibid.com/blog/2011/05/medicare-vs-private-admin-costs-facts-stand/

This is yet another example of something the government can't do as well as private enterprise. There's plenty of ways to bring down the prices of healthcare. It just seems to me that people are not interested in actually doing any of them....

@Karsten. I don't know that a Forbes columnist or a contributor to a website that advocates restoring market-based forces to medical care is the best source for unbiased information pertaining to whether or not private insurance costs less to administer. Biased? Perhaps yes, but certainly not unbiased.

There is a well-researched article on this topic posted on the Pulitzer Prize-winning web site PolitiFact.COM: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/may/30/barbara-boxer/barbara-boxer-says-medicare-overhead-far-lower-pri/

The article uses data compiled from many different sources including the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation as well as the liberal-leaning Urban Institute.

You can read the details at the link but the overall premise of the conclusion is quite reasonable and common sense. It costs less to administer Medicare than it does to administer private insurance plans because private insurers have to account for profits. Also the pool of members across which to apply costs is very deep for Medicare whereas many private plans have smaller memberships to support and overhead would naturally be higher on a percentage cost per member basis.

Michael,

Did you notice that Politico rated the article you rely on to support your argument as only half true? The bottom line is that X number of dollars is going to be spent on health care. The issue, as it seems increasingly so these days with all things political, is whether you believe the government or the private sector can do it better.

Bob

Republican under Gov. Deal have their own version of a death panel. About 850 Georgians die each year because of a lack of health care insurance.Gov. Deal has decided to not insure 650,000 Georgians under Medicaid as provided for by "The Affordable Health Act". The Federal government would even pickup the tab. Deal has just sentenced some of his fellow Georgians to a death sentence.