More Media Defense of Obama -- This Time its Medicare

The media (in this case ABC News) is trying to help president Obama fend off the attacks against him from Mitt Romney who points out that Obamacare has gutted the Medicare program. The defense is so weak that it is actually funny.

Here is a good example. Obamacare takes well over 700 billion dollars out of the Medicare Trust Fund and uses it to pay for Obamacare. That is 700 billion dollars less available to pay for benefits for seniors. Romney says he wants to repeal Obamacare and put that money back into the trust fund to pay for Medicare. In response to this, ABC sniffs that Paul Ryan also wanted to cut Medicare in the House budget two years ago. ABC ignores that a budget that the Senate rejected two years ago is not what Romney is running on while Obamacare is actually a law that Obama got passed which is taking all this money out of Medicare. But let's assume that the budget mattered. Ryan took the money saved and left it in the Medicare trust fund. In other words, Ryan planned to save money in Medicare and used it to keep the system solvent. The money Ryan saved would go to Medicare beneficiaries. The Obama reduction is lost to the system.

ABC also says that repeal of Obamacare would remove the great new procedure in Obamacare that can save waste and fraud in Medicare. The ABC report actually says this: Of the estimated $70 billion of Medicare waste in 2010, for example, regulators have recovered an unprecedented $4 billion thanks to the new measures, according to the nonpartisan Center for Medicare Advocacy.

Think about that! ABC is touting the fact that Medicare is recovering about 5% of the 70 billion dollars in waste just for 2010. In other words, ABC is okay with Obamacare taking over 700 billion dollars from the Medicare Trust Fund because it is also going to put back 4 billion by cutting waste.

The truth is that Mitt Romney has already described one method that will be used to cut waste and fraud in Medicare. He wants to put the Medicare system on computer. Right now, Medicare operates this enormous system using paper files. If the Medicare employees want to find doctors who are doing unusual numbers of expensive procedures (a sign of likely fraud), they have to search through millions of pieces of paper. That means that they never do the search. On the other hand, if the system were put on computer the way Romney wants, it would take ten seconds to get that data. One estimate is that just putting the system on computer would result in savings of about $24 billion per year by cutting waste and fraud. That is six times the $4 billion in savings due to Obamacare that ABC calls "unprecedented".

In other words, Obama has been gutting Medicare with Obamacare. Repeal of Obamacare will give Medicare many additional years of solvency. Adoption of Romney's plans to fight waste and fraud will save close to a quarter of a trillion dollars over the next decade. In short, ABC is fighting a losing battle; Romney is right on Medicare.