Rick Scott Goes to Senior Center to Collect Obamacare Horror Stories ....

.... finds satisfied seniors/praise for Obamacare.

lmao

– Gov. Rick Scott visited a senior center Tuesday to warn about cuts he said Obamacare is forcing in a popular version of the Medicare health program and to collect their horror stories.

What he found was a satisfied group with few complaints.

The 20 seniors assembled for a roundtable with Scott at the Volen Center were largely content with their Medicare coverage and didn’t have negative stories to recount.

And some praised Obamacare – a program that Scott frequently criticizes.

“I’m completely satisfied,” Harvey Eisen, 92, a West Boca resident, told Scott.

Eisen told the governor he wasn’t sure “if, as you say,” there are Obamacare-inspired cuts to Medicare. But even if there are, that would be OK. “I can’t expect that me as a senior citizen are going to get preferential treatment when other programs are also being cut.”

Ruthlyn Rubin, 66, of Boca Raton, told the governor that people who are too young for Medicare need the health coverage they get from Obamacare. If young people don’t have insurance, she said, everyone else ends up paying for their care when they get sick or injured and end up in the hospital.

Eventually, Rubin said, Obamacare will become more popular. “People were appalled at Social Security. They were appalled at Medicare when it came out. I think these major changes take some people aback. But I think we have to be careful not to just rely on the fact that we’re seniors and have an entitlement to certain things,” she said.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/broward/broward-politics-blog/sfl-rick-scott-obamacare-20140429,0,5601325.story

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2014/04/16/Medicare-Advantage-Isn-t-Reducing-Health-Care-Costs

Bowing to election-year and industry pressures, the Obama administration this month quietly rescinded cuts to the Medicare Advantage program and boosted subsidies to insurers.

If the administration, and Congress for that matter, were serious about attacking health care costs, this was a turn into a blind alley.

Related: Obama Administration to Drop Medicare Drug Changes

Medicare Advantage (MA) is a private, fee-for-service and managed care program within Medicare. Instead of traditional Medicare, in which patients can go to any doctor and be charged for every visit, more MA benefits are provided, although the doctor networks may be restricted.

While the original intent of MA, or “Medicare Part C,” may have been to reduce health care costs through more supervised care, the program has been heavily subsidized by taxpayers. The subsidies for insurers participating in the program have been a continuing source of profits for the industry, which has lobbied fiercely to protect their handouts.

A provision in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) called for cutting the Part C subsidies by 2 percent this year. But intense lobbying by the health insurance industry pressured the administration to not only roll back the cuts, but increase the subsidies by 0.4 percent — the second consecutive year the payments have been boosted.

The ACA’s proposed cuts amounted to paring some $200 billion from the program, which was vigorously opposed by America’s Health Insurance Plans, an industry trade association. Some 16 million Americans are covered through MA, or roughly 30 percent of all Medicare patients.