The Romney-Ryan campaign lands a devastating counter-punch on the subject of Medicare, by noting that Obama's raid of the program to finance his hated health-care boondoggle effectively robbed seniors of money they've "paid in" over the course of a lifetime, to "finance a massive new government program that's not for you."
An excellent ad, but if I might offer one minor quibble: the ObamaCare death panels will be for you, seniors. Bet your lives on it. When Medicare collapses under Obama's plan, the rationing powers of the un-elected bureaucrats on the Independent Payment Advisory Board will be brought to bear.
As former American Medical Association president Donald Palmisano explained in a Daily Caller op-ed last March: "IPAB will essentially mean rationed care for our nation???s seniors. The 15 officials who will make up the board will not only be empowered to make what is expected to be billions of dollars??? worth of cuts to Medicare every year, but will be required to do so when spending exceeds targeted rates. IPAB???s recommended cuts will become law unless a supermajority in Congress vetoes the board???s proposal and creates its own cost-cutting proposal of equal size ??? an unlikely scenario even in the most harmonious of political times."
Doctors are already growing less than enthusiastic about accepting Medicare patients. ObamaCare will make the program even less financially attractive for them. And with ObamaCare pushing a huge number of doctors completely out of their practices, the need to ration scarce medical resources will put seniors on the wrong end of quality-of-life equations that prove increasingly difficult to solve. That's the system older Americans were fined $700 billion to construct.
