Dems cut Medicare home health services to fund coverage of uninsured

Grandma got run over by the Democrats.

(By Ed Morrissey, Hot Air) - Over the weekend, the Senate cut a key Medicare service aimed at invalids in an attempt to find the money to pay for ObamaCare. On a 53-41 vote, Senate Democrats cut $43 billion from home health-care services. Democrats insisted that they were cutting waste and abuse, but the end result will be less care for seniors. The New York Times reports on the vote:

By a vote of 53 to 41, the Senate on Saturday rejected a Republican effort to block cutbacks in payments to home health agencies that provide nursing care and therapy to homebound Medicare beneficiaries.

Republicans voted against the cuts, saying they would hurt some of the nation’s most vulnerable citizens. Most Democrats supported the cutbacks, saying they would eliminate waste and inefficiency in home care.

The Democrats’ health care bill would reduce projected Medicare spending on home care by $43 billion, or 13 percent, over the next 10 years. The savings would help offset the cost of subsidizing coverage for the uninsured. …

Mr. Baucus, a principal author of the health care bill, noted that his mother was receiving home health care and said he would not do anything to hurt beneficiaries.

“We are reducing overpayments,” Mr. Baucus said. “We are rooting out fraud. We are getting the waste out. The savings go back in Medicare and extend the solvency of the trust fund.”

Baucus is wrong on both counts. The money goes to funding coverage of the uninsured, which comes primarily through Medicaid, not Medicare, and federal subsidies in the exchange program. The money will go out of Medicare and not come back, which should be rather obvious anyway. If the money stayed in Medicare, it wouldn’t be cut out of it in an amendment — and be part of almost $500 billion in proposed Medicare cuts in ObamaCare proposals.