Obamacare in the Senate: Cutting Medicare

Kathryn Nix / December 07, 2009

Last week’s consideration of amendments to Obamacare focused on Medicare, which is used as one of the main sources of funding for the expansion of Medicaid and the establishment of a new health care entitlement under Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) bill.

The McCain Amendment. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) offered an amendment to recommit and require the Senate Finance Committee to revise Sen. Reid’s health care bill to exclude all spending cuts to Medicare. Senate Democrats include nearly $500 billion in Medicare cuts to pay for the legislation. Sen. McCain said that simply cutting the funding of one entitlement program to create another federal entitlement program would not constitute reform. Instead, hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending will be added to the federal deficit.

With an estimated $60 billion lost each year to fraud, waste, and abuse, Medicare needs reform. But the Congressional Budget Office’s score of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act shows minuscule savings from eliminating or reducing fraud, waste, or abuse in the bill. Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) noted: “We could cover everybody in the country or extend the life of Medicare 20 years by eliminating the fraud that’s in Medicare today. What are we going to do? We’re not. We’re going to create more government programs and more agencies that are going to be designed to be defrauded.” Sen. McCain’s Medicare amendment was defeated by a vote of 42-58. (more…)