ROMNEY AND YOUR GRANDMOTHER
Some helpful reporting by the New York Times, as swing-state voters are assaulted by dishonest Romney ads (emphasis added):
Patients Would Pay More if Romney Restores Medicare Savings, Analysts Say.
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.
. . . 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 . . .
. . . “One can only wonder what’s going on inside their headquarters in Boston and among their policy people,” said John McDonough, the director of the Center for Public Health Leadership at Harvard. “But there are only two explanations: Either they don’t understand how the program works, which is hard to imagine, or there is some deliberate misrepresentation here because they know how politically potent this charge is.”
Read it all here.
IF SHE WEARS GLASSES
The cool kids are wearing Warby Parkers. And saving money doing it. And changing lives. Check it out. I think you’d look good in these, by the way — and $95 for prescription glasses with frames and giving a free pair to someone who needs them . . . how can you beat that? Maybe your grandmama would like a monocle.
