[h/t Heather]
Let's begin the debunking of this shameless exercise in lying to the American public with this: the so-called 'cuts' to Medicare in the Affordable Care Act were really an end to the Bush-era effort to privatize it. Subsidies were eliminated and/or phased out over time, forcing insurers to compete with traditional Medicare. This means they don't get guaranteed profits, courtesy of the American taxpayer and so they have turned to their bought-and-paid-for senators to distort the truth and erode growing support for "Obamacare". In fact, they're so intent on perpetuating these mythical cuts that they have written a competing Medicare handbook to the official government version.
From the transcript:
VAN SUSTEREN: The government has Medicare new 2012 book out. And you guys have a competing Medicare 2012. This is your book. Is this a parody?
SEN. TOM COBURN, R-OKLA.: You might consider it. It's much more truthful than the other one.
VAN SUSTEREN: In what way?
COBURN: In terms of describing what the Obamacare legislation has done to Medicare patients.
BARRASSO: How they took $500 billion away from our seniors on Medicare not to save and strengthen Medicare but to start a whole new government program for other people, how they will have unelected bureaucrats decisions about who gets what care and how much the government pays for it. You can go item by item why Medicare is more at risk now in terms of going bankrupt than it was before Obamacare passed.
What follows is an effort to spark an inter generational war. In addition to being dishonest, it's nothing more than yet another cynical attempt to pit youngers against elders for votes and support, something Republicans can't find much of these days.
VAN SUSTEREN: So if I am clear, we were on an unsustainable path before President Obama's national health care. Then he shepherded through the national health care and we are still in the unsustainable path. But you say $530 billion was taken out of Medicare. Where -- what was it taken from? And where did it go?
COBURN: It's going to go for a innovation council, $10 billion. It will go to subsidize the state exchanges, mandated care that all of us will have to buy if we don't -- can't demonstrate that we have it. So there is a subsidy there.
So we are taking money that people have paid into Medicare, taking it out of Medicare and subsidizing the care for people who have not paid into Medicare.
COBURN: That's part of it. But the vast majority is going into other programs for other people for health care that Medicare dollars weren't paying for to begin with.
Got that? All the Medicare withholdings from your paychecks are counted as 'not paying' by Senator Coburn. Leave it to Greta to just let him go on and on over it too with no challenge.
The next statement is so outrageous he ought to be tried for it:
