Tam said:
We all have heard about how Obama is cutting $716 billion out of Medicare without cutting Elderly beneifits. His plan cuts reembursments to the hospitals and Docters that treat the elderly. Now Would you please explain how cutting what the Hospitals and Docs. get paid is not going to limit the beneifits they will be offering. I know If I were a Doc. and I was getting paid a fraction of the actual cost of a certain treatment I would stop offering that treatment. So Please explain how Obama is not cutting Beneifits to the elderly with his cuts?
When you are done with that, please explain Obama's plan to cut College tuition costs in half. What is that going to do to the education the students are going to get. If a College has half as much tuition fees coming in does it not make sense that they are going to cut their classes and professors to equal out the tuition cuts MANDATED BY OBAMA? But yet he is campaigning on the idea everyone should beable to afford an education. They might be able to afford an education but what kind of education will they get with half as much classes and half as many Professors.
$700 billion in Medicare cuts?
There are cuts and then there are CUTS. Neither Obama nor his health care law literally "cut" a dollar from the Medicare program's budget.
Rather, the health care law instituted a number of changes to reduce the growth of Medicare costs. At the time the law was passed, those reductions amounted to $500 billion over the next 10 years. Time's passage has only boosted that number.
What kind of spending reductions are we talking about? They were mainly aimed at insurance companies and hospitals, not beneficiaries. The law makes significant reductions to Medicare Advantage, a subset of Medicare plans run by private insurers. Medicare Advantage was started under President George W. Bush, and the idea was that competition among the private insurers would reduce costs. But in recent years the plans have actually cost more than traditional Medicare. So the health care law scales back the payments to private insurers.
Hospitals, too, will be paid less if they have too many re-admissions, or if they fail to meet other new benchmarks for patient care.
Still, the overall Medicare budget is projected to go up for the foreseeable future. The health care law tries to limit that growth, making it less than it would have been without the law, but not reducing its overall budget. So claims that Obama would "cut" Medicare need more explanation to be fully accurate. In the past, we've rated similar statements Half True or Mostly False, depending on the wording and context.
Because Medicare spending gets bigger every year, the cost-saving mechanisms in the health care law also get bigger. Also, it takes a few years for the health care law's savings mechanisms to kick in. In fact, the effects of time are the main reason the $500 billion number has turned into $700 billion.
The Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan agency with expert staff that generates projections about how laws affect the federal budget and economy, determined in 2011 that the federal health care law would reduce Medicare outlays by $507 billion between 2012 and 2021. In a more recent estimate released this year, the CBO looked at the years 2013 to 2022 and determined the health care law affected Medicare outlays by $716 billion.
Does the Ryan budget include the same savings as the health care law?
Now onto our second question: Does Ryan's budget include those same reductions in Medicare spending? The short answer is yes.
Here's what Ryan said in an interview with George Stephanopolous of ABC News in June, before his selection as Republican nominee Mitt Romney's running mate:
Stephanopoulos: "You know, several independent fact-checkers have taken a look at that claim, the $500 billion in Medicare cuts, and said that it's misleading. And in fact, by that accounting, your budget, your own budget, which Gov. Romney has endorsed, would also have $500 billion in Medicare cuts."
Ryan: "Well, our budget keeps that money for Medicare to extend its solvency. What Obamacare does is it takes that money from Medicare to spend on Obamacare. ..." (Read the full exchange.)
So Ryan confirmed his budget includes the Medicare savings.
The Romney campaign got questions on this point the day after Cutter's remarks that "Paul Ryan protected those cuts in his budget," and issued a statement saying that Romney intended to fully repeal the federal law, including the savings for Medicare.
"Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have always been fully committed to repealing Obamacare, ending President Obama's $716 billion raid on Medicare, and tackling the serious fiscal challenges our country faces," said Lanhee Chen, Romney's policy director, in a statement reported by NBC News. "A Romney-Ryan administration will restore the funding to Medicare, ensure that no changes are made to the program for those 55 or older, and implement the reforms that they have proposed to strengthen it for future generations."
Cutter, though, was talking about the Ryan budget, as was Clinton. We should point out that the Ryan budget is a congressional resolution that doesn't have the force of law. And its plan for Medicare hasn't been turned into legislation that could be analyzed in detail by the CBO.
Still, Ryan himself said his plan did include the same reductions in future spending that were part of the federal health care law. He explained a few days after Cutter's remarks that it was only because Obama's reduction "was already in the baseline," the Wall Street Journal reported. "We would never have done it in the first place." The article points out, however, that the budget assumed reversal of other Obama spending decisions.
So it was a choice to leave the reductions in place, likely because both sides agree on one point: Medicare spending is growing too rapidly, and it needs to reined in.
Our ruling
Clinton said that Ryan attacked the president for "the same amount of Medicare savings that (Ryan) had in his own budget." Clinton is correct that the Ryan budget plan included cost savings that were part of the health care law. Just recently, the Romney campaign backed away from that plan, saying Romney's plan would restore the spending that the health law is set to curtail, such as extra funding for private insurers under the Medicare Advantage plan.
Still, Clinton was right about the Ryan plan. We rate his statement True.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/sep/06/bill-clinton/clinton-says-ryan-attacked-obama-medicare-cuts-ref/
Tuition has grown nearly five times faster than inflation since 1985, and about twice as much as health care costs, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, commonly referred to as the stimulus, helped replenish state coffers during the Great Recession, but this trend of gutting public higher education started in the 1980's.
There are misplaced priorities among public universities as well. For example, college presidents and administrators continue to get six-figure raises, even as students get hit with double-digit tuition hikes. Not to mention lavish rec centers and major athletic programs which operate in the red.
The president has called for a Race to the Top-styled program to reward colleges which keep their costs down, but without Congressional action, that plan has gone no where. Obama sought to withhold federal money from colleges who fail to remain affordable, but higher ed leaders and Republicans spoke out against it. Although, Republicans proposed a very similar idea in 2003.
Obama has also pushed to continue increasing the Pell Grant to help low-income students attend college, but that too was stopped by a Congressional stalemate.
Still, the progress Obama has made most significantly with the 2010 Student Aid and Financial Responsibility Act, was highlighted by Bill Clinton Wednesday as something "every voter needs to know about."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/07/obama-college-costs_n_1865153.html
Our ruling
Romney's campaign has said that the former Massachusetts governor will not renew the American Opportunity Tax Credit if he is elected in November. And because it's slated to expire at the end of 2012, it would no longer be available to college students and their families if no action is taken to extend it, as Obama has done since it was enacted in 2009.
But the AOTC is not the only tax deduction out there for students, as Obama's ads may lead voters to believe. So while Romney would allow the deduction to end, it does not mean all college tax deductions would be lost. In fact, it would revert back to a previous program that has been in place since 1997. As a result, we rate Obama's claim Mostly True.
http://www.politifact.com/new-hampshire/statements/2012/aug/31/barack-obama/romneyryan-budget-would-be-end-road-american-oppor/
Our ruling
Obama said Romney is proposing a tax plan "that would give millionaires another tax break and raises taxes on middle class families by up to $2,000 a year."
The claims are based on a study by the Tax Policy Center, which used what Romney has said about his tax plan and attempted to calculate outcomes for different groups of taxpayers.
The study prioritizes the idea that the plan would be revenue neutral. In that scenario, millionaires lose deductions, but the lower rates would still decrease their tax bill by an average of $87,000.
Middle-class taxpayers would see lower tax rates, too, but the loss of exemptions and deductions would hit them harder. People making $200,000 or less a year would see their taxes rise by an average of about $2,000.
The study is making the point that Romney's plan is untenable: to cut rates that much without adding to the deficit, something has to give. It necessarily makes some assumptions, and therefore these conclusions are not definite as long as the details of the plan remain unknown. For that reason, people should be cautious in calling this Romney's plan.
We rate the claim Mostly True.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/aug/03/barack-obama/obama-romney-would-cut-millionaires-taxes/
tax the rich. hit them hard. make the rich finally start paying their fare share, and please include their pensions, stock options, annual incentive, etc., because taxes on one million salary is one thing, but taxes on annual incentive, stock options, and other perks, well, that's another story. tax it all the same. this is the top paid exec. out of 100 examples in Houston area alone recently ;
base salary $1,400,000.
Annual incentive $21,821,400.
total equity $6,414,055.
all other comp $276,207.
change in pension $1,617,757.
Total direct compensation $31,529,419.
see more here ;
http://fuelfix.com/blog/2012/07/30/pay-swells-for-top-bosses/
SHOW US YOUR TAX RECORDS MITT, ALL OF THEM !
OBAMA 2012 !
