President Joe Biden’s administration announced that it would cut Medicare Advantage, after the president has frequently claimed that Republicans want to slash Medicare and Social Security.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced this week that they would cut Medicare Advantage by 1.12 percent in 2024, which is not as significant a cut as what the administration proposed two months ago.
Bloomberg reported:
The agency will also phase in controversial changes that determine payments based on the severity of patients’ health problems. That policy will take effect over three years instead of one year, after the proposal drew fierce criticism from the industry.
The changes add up to a near-term victory for the industry, which had argued that the Biden administration went too far in its initial proposal. But the policy may mark the start of a period of slower growth for a market that has doubled in size in the last decade, driving growth and profits at major insurers.
Biden has proposed these cuts to Medicare Advantage as he has frequently accused Republicans of wanting to slash Social Security and Medicare as part of a potential compromise to address the coming debt ceiling deadline.
Republicans such as Sens. Steve Daines (R-MT), Tom Cotton (R-AR), and Rep. Kevin Hern (R-OK), the chairman of the Republican Study Committee (RSC), have called out Biden’s apparently hypocrisy.
Breitbart News reported that Biden sponsored a bill in 1975 that would sunset and reauthorize all federal programs, which includes Social Security and Medicare.
“We must… begin reviewing existing programs to determine whether they are still effective, and whether they are worth the money that we are putting in them. We must eliminate the wasteful ones,” Biden said when introducing the 1975 legislation.
“One thing that we have all observed is that once a federal program gets started, it is very difficult to stop it, or even change its emphasis, regardless of its performance in the past,” then-Sen. Biden continued. “It is time for us to require, on a regular and continuing basis, that both the administrators of these programs and we legislators who adopt the programs, examine their operations with care and detail.”
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.
