Actually, Newt was an early supporter of Medicare Advantage plans, a free market alternative to traditional Medicare.
Right, wasn't Newt slammed for saying his legislation would cause Medicare to "wither on the vine" as people switched from Government Healthcare to private advantage plans amd medical savings accounts? Lots of ignorant, deluded people running around these days forming opinions based on a single piece of anecdotal evidence cherry-picked from a guy who likes to brainstorm in public. Not real smart...
Newt has also pledged to repeal Obamacare.
And then there’s Gingrich’s turbulent four-year tenure as speaker of the House, in which he was as responsible as anyone for the growth of federal health-care entitlements to their current unsustainable levels.
In 1997, the Gingrich-led House of Representatives passed legislation creating the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or S-CHIP, which was then the largest statutory expansion of Medicaid since the program was founded in 1965. Today, thanks to Newt Gingrich, nearly 4 in 10 children in the United States are on Medicaid. Many of those kids were forced off of higher-quality private-sector health coverage and forced into the Medicaid ghetto, where poor children die of toothaches due to inadequate care.
Another dubious part of the 1997 Gingrich-Clinton budget deal was the Medicare Sustainable Growth Rate, in which the Gingrich-led House passed what has become one of Washington’s favorite accounting gimmicks: pretending to drastically cut Medicare payments to doctors and hospitals in the future, so as to make the long-term budget outlook appear better than it is, while in reality passing “doc fix” legislation each year that keeps Medicare payments on their prior trajectory. The “doc fix” that Congress is contemplating for 2012 will cost $22 billion, a figure that goes up over time as the gap widens between what the 1997 law prescribed and what Medicare costs today.
I do not know the advantages or disadvantages of the Medicare Advantage Programs.
I am on Medicare, I thought that the Advantage Programs were going to get the axe under the new "obama health care".
This sounds nice in theory, but as a matter of policy, it’s wrong. Medicare Advantage has 25 percent of the market in part because, prior to Obamacare, the government paid 14 percent more for a senior in Medicare Advantage than for one in traditional Medicare. (Obamacare significantly trimmed this subsidy.) Medicare Advantage has many qualities, but it has not reduced Medicare spending at all.
This sounds nice in theory, but as a matter of policy, it’s wrong. Medicare Advantage has 25 percent of the market in part because, prior to Obamacare, the government paid 14 percent more for a senior in Medicare Advantage than for one in traditional Medicare. (Obamacare significantly trimmed this subsidy.) Medicare Advantage has many qualities, but it has not reduced Medicare spending at all.
This sounds nice in theory, but as a matter of policy, it’s wrong. Medicare Advantage has 25 percent of the market in part because, prior to Obamacare, the government paid 14 percent more for a senior in Medicare Advantage than for one in traditional Medicare. (Obamacare significantly trimmed this subsidy.) Medicare Advantage has many qualities, but it has not reduced Medicare spending at all.