'Patients Would Pay More if Romney Restores Medicare Savings'

'Patients Would Pay More if Romney Restores Medicare Savings':
Mitt
Romney’s promise to restore Obama's Medicare savings is “both puzzling and bogus":

Patients Would Pay More if Romney Restores Medicare Savings, Analysts Say, by
Jackie Calmes, NY Times: Mitt Romney’s promise to restore $716 billion that
he says President Obama “robbed” from Medicare has some health care experts
puzzled, and not just because his running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan,
included the same savings in his House budgets.

The 2010 health care law cut Medicare reimbursements to hospitals and insurers,
not benefits for older Americans, by that amount over the coming decade. But
repealing the savings, policy analysts say, would hasten the insolvency of
Medicare by eight years — to 2016, the final year of the next presidential term,
from 2024.

While Republicans have raised legitimate questions about the long-term
feasibility of the reimbursement cuts, analysts say, to restore them in the
short term would immediately add hundreds of dollars a year to out-of-pocket
Medicare expenses for beneficiaries. That would violate Mr. Romney’s vow that
neither current beneficiaries nor Americans within 10 years of eligibility would
be affected by his proposal to shift Medicare to a voucherlike system in which
recipients are given a lump sum to buy coverage from competing insurers.

For those reasons, Henry J. Aaron, an economist and a longtime health policy
analyst at the Brookings Institution and the Institute of Medicine, called Mr.
Romney’s vow to repeal the savings “both puzzling and bogus at the same time.”

Marilyn Moon, vice president and director of the health program at the American
Institutes for Research, calculated that restoring the $716 billion in Medicare
savings would increase premiums and co-payments for beneficiaries by $342 a year
on average over the next decade; in 2022, the average increase would be $577.
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