You have shown savings. There are $700 billion less benefits and services. Oh, there's your savings!!!
How come the same 700 billion wasnt a bad Idea when the Republicans Initially proposed the same cuts?
Says Paul Ryan's budget relies on the same $700 billion in savings from Medicare that Mitt Romney and other Republicans have been attacking Democrats about.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/aug/15/stephanie-cutter/ryans-plan-includes-700-billion-medicare-cuts-says/
$700 billion in Medicare cuts?
Because we’re wonks ourselves at PolitiFact, our ears pricked up at the claim in recent days that Obama cut $700 billion out of Medicare. Just a few weeks ago, the oft-cited number was $500 billion. How did he manage to cut another $200 billion when no one was looking?
Well, 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.
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 CBO
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.