Obama and the Marx Brothers

****"Are you going to believe ME or your own lying eyes" and common sense?****
http://tinyurl.com/mcdp87
Medicare for Dummies Contradictions worthy of the Marx Brothers.WSJ...So as a public service, let's try to navigate the, er, remarkable Medicare discussion that President Obama delivered on Wednesday. It isn't easy...."our health-care program is our deficit problem. Nothing else even comes close." On this score he's right. Medicare's unfunded liability...is currently some $37 trillion over the next 75 years. Yet the President uses this insolvency as an argument to justify the creation of another health-care entitlement, this time for most everyone under age 65. It's like a variation on the old Marx Brothers routine: "The soup is terrible and the portions are too small."
...Mr. Obama claimed he can finance universal health care without adding "one dime to the deficit, now or in the future, period," in large part by pumping money out of Medicare....would cut Medicare by as much as $500 billion, mainly by cutting what Mr. Obama called "waste and abuse."...****If there's "waste and abuse" to be eliminated, why not do that first, before any new spending is proposed?****...no cuts, for anyone—except, that is, for the 24% of senior beneficiaries who are enrolled in the Medicare Advantage program, which Democrats want to slash by $177 billion...
Advantage does provide better care, which is one reason that enrollment has doubled since 2003...Advantage plans have excelled at filling in the gaps of the a la carte medicine of traditional Medicare, contracting with doctors and hospitals to coordinate care and improve quality and covering items such as vision, hearing and management of chronic illness. If seniors in Advantage lose this coverage because of the 14% or 15% budget cut that Mr. Obama favors, well, that's "waste and abuse." Mr. Obama did also promise to create "an independent commission of doctors and medical experts charged with identifying more waste in the years ahead." ...many of the elderly worried about government rationing of treatment...the way it has in every other state-run system....a partisan swipe at one of the best GOP ideas to rationalize the federal budget, despite Mr. Obama's accusations that his opponents want to do "nothing." This reform would get Medicare out of the business of spending one out of five U.S. health dollars, and instead give the money directly to seniors to buy insurance to encourage them to be more conscious of cost and value within a limited budget. Democrats would rather have seniors dance to decisions made by his unelected "commission of doctors and medical experts."..."civility" in debate even as he calls the arguments of his critics "lies." So in the spirit of civility, we won't accuse the President of lying about Medicare. We'll just say his claims bear little relation to anything true.