COVID-19 & Healthcare

by David Safier

Before carefully and accurately taking apart Brady McCombs' front page article in the Sunday Star, "Seniors' benefits dominate CD 8 race" (print edition only), AZ Blue Meanie accuses me of being a soft old teacher, always looking for the good in people. Guilty as charged. See, the high school English teacher in me saw a marked improvement in McCombs' article on the Kelly press conference in the print edition over the earlier online version. It went from a C- online to a B+ in print. But then he didn't write a similar article, online or in the print edition, covering the Barber press conference the next week even though he was there taking notes. That's a double F for failure to turn in required work. And as the Meanie demonstrates in detail, today's article creates a false equivalence between the truth and falsehood of a number of assertions made by the Barber and Kelly campaigns.

Grading today's article is bit of a stumper for this old teacher. I'll have give it a B+ for style and readability over a D for giving readers the information they need to separate fact from fiction. Since I prize content over style, the overall grade is a C-.

Eight paragraphs into the article, there's nothing but a simplistic "He said, He said" recitation of the way the two sides portray each other on Social Security and Medicare. Since most readers won't get much farther than that, the takeaway is: Both sides are spinning equally, so when you vote, choose the guy whose looks you like the best.

[Note: I understand this is how articles are structured, moving from the general to the specific. But instead of wasting the sidebar with a list of mind-numbing figures, the space could have been used to summarize the arguments on both sides and to rate their validity.]

BlogForArizona Exclusive: By Dr. Richard Carmona The Arizona legislature pushed bad health policy throughout its session, and Governor Brewer just compounded those mistakes by signing a bill blocking access to contraception. This new law doesn't make any sense — and the harm it will cause the women of our state is startling. There is absolutely … Read more

by David Safier If you listen to The Hill, it sounds like Jesse Kelly hasn't been very consistent in his stands on Social Security and Medicare — damned inconsistent, as a matter of fact. The headline: GOP nominee for Giffords's seat reverses course on entitlements And the first line: After three years of saying that … Read more

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The National Republican Campaign Committee believes voters are just plain stupid. They continue to repeat the $500 billion lie that will not die even after it has beem debunked repeatedly by every media fact checker since 2010.

Voters should be offended by the NRCC insulting your intelligence with such lazy repetition of lies.

The Tucson Weekly correctly points out in CD8: The Surrogates Battle in Race To Finish Giffords' Term that:

The NRCC ad makes two claims that have been declared "false" by Politifact.

The first is the question of whether Obamacare cuts Medicare by $500 billion. This is a frequent GOP attack line that Politifact has repeatedly rated as false:

There’s a small bit of truth here. The Affordable Care Act does reduce Medicare spending by $500 billion over the next 10 years. But here’s the catch: Those dollars aren’t taken out of the current budget, they are not actual cuts, and nowhere does the bill actually eliminate any current benefits.

The $500 billion is all in future spending reductions and come through the law’s attempts to slow projected growth, not cut spending.

PolitiFact National has highlighted the biggest bits of savings: About $220 billion comes from reducing annual increases in Medicare payments to health care providers. Another $36 billion comes from increasing premiums for higher-income beneficiaries. Administrative changes land another $12 billion in savings. A new national board is set to come up with $15.5 billion in savings — but can’t get those savings from a reduction in benefits. The last big chunk of $136 billion comes in changes to the Medicare Advantage program, which has become more expensive than initially anticipated.

Still, given all these changes, Medicare spending is expected to increase — something we pointed out in our fact check on Bruun a year ago. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects Medicare spending will reach $929 billion in 2020, up from $499 billion in actual spending in 2009.

The claim that Democrats voted to cut $500 billion from Medicare is especially amusing when you consider that the Ryan budget that GOP members in the House overwhelmingly supported earlier this year includes those same reductions in spending growth. (Kelly, who is far more cautious about what he says to the press in this year's campaign, declined to say whether he'd support the Ryan budget when we asked him about it during the GOP primary.)

FWIW, Barber said last week that he would not support cuts to Medicare benefits.

The second claim is that Obamacare "puts a board of unelected bureaucrats in charge." That's a reference to the Patient Advisory Board, which has been a frequent target of attack by Republicans. Politifact has rated those attacks "False".

Video below the fold.

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

I happened to catch this AP report in the Arizona Republic Study: Obama's health-care law would raise deficit

[A] leading conservative economist estimates in a study to be released Tuesday that the overhaul will add at least $340 billion to the deficit, not reduce it.

Charles Blahous, who serves as public trustee overseeing Medicare and Social Security finances, also suggested that federal accounting practices have obscured the true fiscal impact of the controversial legislation, the fate of which is now in the hands of the Supreme Court.

* * *

Blahous, in his 52-page analysis released by George Mason University's Mercatus Center, said, "Taken as a whole, the enactment of the (health-care law) has substantially worsened a dire federal fiscal outlook.

The AP disclosed that "Blahous served in the George W. Bush White House from 2001-2009, rising to deputy director of the National Economic Council. He currently is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center."

The Mercatus Center just happens to be one of the billionaire bastard Koch brother's think tanks. Koch-Funded GOP Economist Uses New Math To Find That Health Reform Increases The Deficit | ThinkProgress:

George W. Bush’s Social Security privatization guru Charles Blahous — who now works for the Koch-funded Mercatus Center — is out with a new report alleging that the Affordable Care Act adds $340 billion to the deficit. The new math relies on the old “double counting” meme — an argument advanced by Republicans in Congress in the final days of the health care reform debate alleging that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) appropriated the same revenue for extending the solvency of the Medicare trust fund as it did for paying out benefits.

* * *

What Blahous calls “double counting” is actually the “unified budget process,” an accounting method that considers the spending and revenues of the entire federal budget over a 10 year period and the way Congress keeps track of its dollars. It’s the same math that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) relied on to conclude in 2010 that the law “would produce a net reduction in federal deficits of $143 billion over the 2010–2019 period as result of changes in direct spending and revenues.” Earlier this week, the CBO updated its estimate, reporting that the Affordable Care Act is expected to cost $50 billion less than they anticipated and Medicare actuaries reported that as a result of the savings in the law, the life of Medicare’s Hospital Insurance (HI) Fund is extended to 2024, instead of in 2016.