Specious reasoning and fraudulent argument

Crap from AARP
http://tinyurl.com/mk5ja3
How Health Care Reforms Would Affect Medicare
Controlling the rising costs of Medicare doesn’t mean cutting benefits By: Patricia Barry | Source: AARP Bulletin September 18, 2009
There is nothing in this piece that argues anything of the kind indicated by the title which is disconnected from the text. Figuring that most readers will stop at the title and subtitle, the article will be taken by many as "evidence."
The first part is nothing but an appeal to "experts" who "assert" things including such unlikely ideas as that screening procedures will reduce costs. While some do, many do not since most of the people screened do not have substantial likelihood of having the disease in question. (Why not, otherwise, give everyone full-body CT and MRI scans as a prophylactic measure? It might be useful in individual cases but it can usually not be justified en masse.Places where it can be useful, e.g. Liquid Pap screening for cervical cancer, are not even covered for women younger than 25 by the National Health Service in Britain.)The experts assert that seniors are "being lied to". Then the article goes on to the "unacceptable alternative" or "false dichotomy" argument: if nothing is done Medicare will go broke. That Medicare will still go broke, and likely sooner, is not mentioned. Sensible experts are quoted saying sensible things ( e.g. "we need to make some changes...") are quoted without saying whether specific changes will make things better or worse. The admission that $500Billion will be pulled from Medicare over ten years is brushed off by the assertion that the total bill for Medicare is $6.4Trillion over this time. There is the inevitable resort of charlatans to "reducing fraud and waste more aggressively." ( Why not do this NOW? )It is mentioned that much money will come out of Medicare Advantage meaning that the present beneficiaries of these subsidies will suffer. We're told that they'll be "paying doctors more for (good) practices..." and paying other providers "a little less.
Then there's a total confusion between "price" and "cost" including among some who should know better. The reader is swindled by the argument that, as Medicare spending goes down, the individual benefits since her 20% will go down. Not so. Medicare doesn't pay the retail price for health care but your 20% comes out of that although Medicare doesn't pay 4X what you (or your additional insurance ) are supposed to pay. Then it complains about what is "used for plan administration and profits and not direct health care services for beneficiaries." Plan administration is not less as plans get larger and is never paying for "direct...services." If the Medicare Advantage program is as wasteful as claimed, why was it not attacked long before this? An "advantage" is eliminating a scheduled pay cut to Medicare physicians although this has been continually waived because it would cause a disastrous loss of physicians to the Medicare program.
On a Saturday morning talk show, some flack named Julian Epstein claimed that "every economist agrees that the stimulus plan worked and that the economy is recovering." Two fallacies for the price of one: 1) One is hard-pressed to find any economist outside of the New York Times' pages who says this; and 2) It's an example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: it comes after therefore it's because of what came earlier. One might as well say the economy is recovering because of the money given to ACORN. Europe seems to be recovering faster. Anyway, three internationally renowned economists argue that the stimulus had no positive effect even short-term (and will likely have a very negative effect long-term.)
http://tinyurl.com/mhdkmh
The Stimulus Didn't Work The data show government transfers and rebates have not increased consumption at all.By JOHN F. COGAN, JOHN B. TAYLOR AND VOLKER WIELAND
Is the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 working? ...Administration economists cited Keynesian models that predicted that the $787 billion stimulus package would increase GDP by enough to create 3.6 million jobs. Our own research showed that more modern macroeconomic models predicted only one-sixth of that GDP impact. Estimates by economist Robert Barro of Harvard predicted the impact would not be significantly different from zero.Now, six months after the act's passage, we no longer have to rely solely on the predictions of models. We can look and see what actually happened... Direct evidence of an impact by government spending can be found in 1.8 of the 5.4 percentage-point improvement from the first to second quarter of this year. However, more than half of this contribution was due to defense spending that was not part of the stimulus package....The growth improvement in the second quarter must have been largely due to factors other than the stimulus package. Incoming data will reveal more in coming months, but the data available so far tell us that the government transfers and rebates have not stimulated consumption at all, and that the resilience of the private sector following the fall 2008 panic--not the fiscal stimulus program--deserves the lion's share of the credit for the impressive growth improvement from the first to the second quarter. ...