President Obama is wooing seniors with promises to protect Medicare as they've known it. On the defensive because of the $716 billion his health care law takes from Medicare, Obama assures seniors he's cutting payments to hospitals and other providers, not their benefits. Don't be bamboozled. It's illogical to think that reducing what a hospital is paid to treat seniors won't harm their care. A mountain of scientific evidence proves the cuts will worsen the chance that an elderly patient survives a hospital stay and goes home. Itâs reasonable to conclude that tens of thousands of seniors will die needlessly each year. Under ObamaaCare, hospitals, hospice care, dialysis centers, and nursing homes will be paid less to care for the same number of seniors than if the health law had not been enacted. Payments to doctors will also be cut. Scientific evidence published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, a leading scientific journal, suggests that forcing hospitals to spend less on elderly patients will produce deadly results. Exhaustive data on over two million elderly patients treated at 208 California hospitals from 1999 to 2008 show that elderly patients treated in low spending hospitals (bottom quintile) get less care and have a worse chance of surviving and leaving the hospital than elderly patients with the same diagnosis treated at higher spending hospitals. The research, sponsored by the National Institute on Aging and RAND and published in 2011 found that heart attack patients were 19% more likely to die at low spending hospitals. Over a four year period, 13,613 seniors with pneumonia, stroke, heart attacks and other common conditions who died at low spending hospitals would have recovered and gone home had they been treated at a higher spending institution.(Annals of Internal Medicine, February 1, 2011) Thatâs the death toll in one state with about 10% of the Medicare population. Ignoring this evidence, the Obama administration is pressuring hospitals in all fifty states to imitate low spending hospitals. http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/09/12/obamacare-cuts-to-hospitals-will-cost-seniors-their-lives/
1) We need to reduce the budgetary strain of seniors. 2) 90% of healthcare costs occur last 6 weeks of life . 3) Just because hospitals don't get more money doesn't mean huge potential outlays in other settings won't be encountered. political bean counters are notoriously inept with their compartmentalized thinking all in the guise of "pretending to solve the problem"