It appears there is no misrepresentation to which Obama administration officials will not stoop in their deceitful effort to sell Obamacare to the American public.
Support for repeal and replacement of the fatally flawed law is steadily growing — reaching 63 percent in the most recent Rasmussen survey. Maybe that is why Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has resorted to sending millions of senior Americans a sales brochure that is packed with blatantly false claims about Obamacare.
Sebelius has yet to respond to a recent letter from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and seven of his GOP colleagues demanding explanations for the many falsehoods in the brochure, which is titled “Medicare and the new health care law — What it means for you.” It was published by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the sprawling division of HHS that is at the center of Obamacare implementation and management. That this brochure was prepared by government employees and paid for with federal tax dollars is only the first of multiple outrages here.
How does the brochure misrepresent the facts about Obamacare? First, the brochure claims that under the new law, “the guaranteed Medicare benefits you currently receive will remain the same.” But the CMS’ own experts said in a report earlier this year that the new law’s cuts in Medicare spending may push as many as 15 percent of hospitals and other institutional providers into the red, “possibly jeopardizing access” to needed care for millions of seniors. There is no way that current Medicare benefits will remain the same if one of every seven medical providers is no longer profitable.
Second, the brochure claims Obamacare includes “improvements to Medicare Advantage,” but says nothing about the fact that the new law includes at least $130 billion in spending cuts for that program. Only in Obamaworld does a $130 billion spending cut in a program for millions of seniors qualify as an “improvement.”
McConnell noted in an angry floor speech last week about the CCS brochure that “the flier purports to inform seniors about what the health care bill would mean for them. Much of it directly contradicts what the administration’s own experts have said about the law. And all this is bought and paid for by the American taxpayer. So this is a complete outrage, and it’s precisely the kind of thing Americans are so angry about at the moment.”
We eagerly await Sebelius’ reply.
