Where's the savings

With all of the recent discussions about Medicare since the Ryan budget proposal was passed by the House, I think it is time that we list certain agreed principles that cover that program.

1) Medicare in its present form is going broke. It will run out of money in something between 5 and 15 years.

2) If no change is made to the Medicare system, those people alive in 2020 will have a system that will be drastically different from the one in place today.

3) There is a great deal of waste and fraud in the current system. There is at least a half a trillion dollars of waste and fraud that will hit the system over the next decade.

That's all that has been agreed, but there is no question that these three propositions are correct. So what does that mean for the current debate?

1) All the talk about how the Ryan plan ends Medicare as we know it is correct. Medicare as we know it will be gone in a few years no matter what anyone does and no matter what plan is adopted.

2) Obama and the Obamacrats have said repeatedly that they want to use the savings from ending waste and fraud in Medicare to fund Obamacare. In fact, they legislated exactly that as the basis for Obamacare.

3) President Obama now says that he wants to use the same savings from waste and fraud in Medicare to save the Medicare system. the problem is that this savings has already been spent for Obamacare and cannot be used twice.

4) Since the Obamacare law was signed about a year and a quarter ago, there should have been about $60 billion of waste and fraud eliminated from Medicare if Obama were doing his job and administering the plan to eliminate that waste and fraud. In actual fact, since Obamacare was signed, the amount of waste and fraud eliminated from Medicare is ZERO!!!

So here is the final conclusion: The Democrats are talking about saving Medicare as we know it when they know full well that it cannot be done. Further, Obama talks about eliminating waste and fraud but he does absolutely nothing about it.