Uh Oh, Here comes P.T. Again

When we last left our erstwhile hero, the sucker hunter, he’d found out that ObamaCare is nothing but a thinly disguised way of rewarding political favors by the Obama administration.

What has P.T. found since then?

Well, remember that part of the bill entailed huge cuts to Medicare. That’s part of the budget math they did to enable them to claim it was cost effective.
But guess what? Turns out those lawmakers were fibbing to us. I know that you’re as shocked as I am to discover that.

Soon after Obamacare was passed into law, Medicare Chief Actuary Richard Foster wrote that seniors’ access to care would be threatened as a result of reductions in payment updates included in the new law. Foster wrote, “[P]roviders for whom Medicare constitutes a substantive portion of their business could find it difficult to remain profitable and, absent legislative intervention, might end their participation in the program.”

Now, lawmakers have already begun to squirm under the political pressure to prevent the planned cuts to seniors’ care. In a recent article, The Hill highlighted the fact that Senators on both sides of the aisle promised to fight proposed cuts to the home health care industry under the new law. According to Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), “Deep cuts in access to home healthcare takes us in completely the wrong direction at a time when we’re trying to control costs.” Collins, along with Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA), plans to introduce legislation that would require the Secretary of Health and Human Services to justify her reasons for cutting payments to home health care.

I might be tempted to believe this was an honest mistake, and that this was just missed in the overwhelming complexity of the enormous bill. Except for the fact that many people were bringing this up at the time.

Of course, even the argument that it was lost in the complexity is a failed one. The overwhelming complexity of ObamaCare is one of the biggest reasons that it should have never even made it to the floor of the House or the Senate. Every day we discover parts of it that need rewritten, or nullified, or ignored.

I think it’s reasonable to deduce that in this area, our legislators knew what they were doing, and never intended to take the money from Medicare. They smiled, knowing they’d fooled us again, and called us “suckers”, knowing that they’d fix it later, after the bill passed, when it was too late.
So, if you’re one of the vanishingly small number of people that still think this law is good for the country, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, then you’re the one P.T. is looking for.

Sucker.