As Governor Rick Scott (R-FLA) ducked and dodged his way around Florida in an effort to avoid the final week of actual legislative work, he was hawking Obamacare Horror Stories on Tuesday at Volen Center, a senior care center. But what he got in return was a bunch of seniors schooling him on reality.
They like Obamacare, they think it’s important, and they think everyone should have coverage. In other words, they do not hate their neighbor so the Republican con to hate and fear Obamacare is doomed from the get go.
Scott wanted horror stories to add to his book, but instead he was met with a “satisfied” group with “few complaints”, according to Anthony Man at the Sun Sentinel.
Here’s a few delicious quotes from the group, including schooling him on how even if they lose parts of Medicare because of Obamacare, this is America and we should spread it around, because everyone should have coverage:
“I’m completely satisfied,” Harvey Eisen, 92, a West Boca resident, told Scott.
Eisen told the governor he wasn’t sure “if, as you say,” there are Obamacare-inspired cuts to Medicare. But even if there are, that would be OK. “I can’t expect that me as a senior citizen are going to get preferential treatment when other programs are also being cut.”
Ruthlyn Rubin, 66, of Boca Raton, told the governor that people who are too young for Medicare need the health coverage they get from Obamacare. If young people don’t have insurance, she said, everyone else ends up paying for their care when they get sick or injured and end up in the hospital.
Eventually, Rubin said, Obamacare will become more popular. “People were appalled at Social Security. They were appalled at Medicare when it came out. I think these major changes take some people aback. But I think we have to be careful not to just rely on the fact that we’re seniors and have an entitlement to certain things,” she said.
“We’re all just sitting here taking it for granted that because we have Medicare we don’t want to lose one part of it. That’s wrong to me. I think we have to spread it around. This is the United States of America. It’s not the United States of senior citizens,” Rubin said from her spot two seats away from the governor.
Of course, Rick Soctt’s lies about Obamacare stealing from Medicare were trotted out by Mitt Romney in 2012 and they were lies then, and they are lies now. Romney’s claim got a rating of Mostly False from Politifact.
Neither Obama nor his health care law literally cut a dollar amount from the Medicare program’s budget.
Rather, the health care law instituted a number of changes to try to bring down future health care costs in the program. At the time the law was passed, those reductions amounted to $500 billion over the next 10 years.
What kind of spending reductions are we talking about? They were mainly aimed at insurance companies and hospitals, not beneficiaries. The law makes significant reductions to Medicare Advantage, a subset of Medicare plans run by private insurers. Medicare Advantage was started under President George W. Bush, and the idea was that competition among the private insurers would reduce costs. But in recent years the plans have actually cost more than traditional Medicare. So the health care law scales back the payments to private insurers.
Oh, oopsie, Obamacare is actually saving money by cutting waste — and this waste is courtesy of George W. Bush.
Predictably, it is actually the Republican Party that took aim at actual services of Medicare in the Ryan plan, and seek to turn it into a “voucher” program, which is tantamount to stripping it of the social safety net aspect of it, which is….
Fundamentally changing it so as to destroy it. But we are all to pretend that we don’t know that voucher programs don’t keep up with the rising costs. It’s not fair to say Republicans are killing Medicare. Republicans just want to change the meaning of Medicare so that it doesn’t mean the essential part of what it means right now. Don’t you feel better?
With 14 felonies of Medicare fraud under his belt as head of Columbia/HCA Healthcare, Rick Scott knows Mediscare. But when he tried to pull his horror story games on seniors, they weren’t buying it. Chalk this group of seniors up as yet another group that aren’t buying the GOP Horror Show con.
Republicans are supposed to run away with 2014, but it sure doesn’t look like a done deal to me. After all, ObamaScare was their only platform, and yet even when people don’t know the facts, they aren’t buying into the fear behind the lies, and that spells trouble for Republicans.
Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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