While President Obama and the Democrats seek to distance themselves
from proposals to privatize Medicare, Ryan and Bush only openly express
what many Democrats are thinking. The Obama administration, with the
Affordable Care Act (ACA) leading the charge, is working to gut Medicare
and transform it into a poverty program with barebones coverage for the
majority of working class and middle class seniors.
In 2013, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the ACA would
reduce Medicare spending by $716 billion from 2013 to 2022. Under the
first four years of the ACA, home health care under Medicare is being
cut by 14 percent, including $60 million in 2015 and $350 million in
2016. While doing nothing to rein in the outrageous charges by
pharmaceutical companies for cancer and other life-saving drugs, the
Obama administration’s proposed 2016 budget includes $126 billion in
cuts from what Medicare will pay for these drugs.
In what constitutes a historic attack on the program, Obama hailed as a “bipartisan achievement” passage of a bill in April
that expands means testing for Medicare and establishes a new payment
system in which doctors will be rewarded for cutting costs, while being
punished for the volume and frequency of the health care services they
provide.
-- Kate Randall, "Fifty years on: Medicare under assault" (WSWS).