Republicans Want To Cut Medicare Payments To Doctors

Republicans seem determined to deny health care to many people in this country. When Bush was president, they cut health insurance for the children of poor and working class families. Fortunately, the Democrats restored that after taking over both houses of Congress. Then the Republicans opposed the health care bill that would extend insurance coverage to millions of Americans who had no health insurance coverage. Once again it took the Democrats to make things right and pass the health care bill.

Now the Republicans want to deny the elderly the right to see a doctor of their choosing. Medicare payments to doctors are already so low that many doctors no longer will accept elderly people as patients (thanks to cuts in Medicare payments during the last Republican administration). Now it looks like Republicans want to make many more doctors do the same.

I have discussed this with my own doctor and she told me she will have to stop accepting new Medicare patients if there are further cuts to Medicare payments (because if Medicare pays less than current rates she will not be able to cover the expense of treating those patients). And that's just what is fixing to happen. Unless Congress acts to prevent it, Medicare payments to doctors will soon be cut by a whopping 21%.

President Obama is asking Congress to stop these scheduled cuts in payments to doctors, but the Republicans are having none of it. Instead, they are whining about the Democrats raising taxes, because the bill would also greatly increase the tax that big oil companies must pay into a spill liability fund (a tax I believe most people would support in light of the current Gulf disaster).

To me, the position Republicans are currently taking is indefensible. They not only want to greatly reduce the number of doctors available to the elderly (which is already at a critical stage in many rural areas), but they also want to protect their buddies at the big oil companies from having to cough up the money to clean up the oil disasters that they cause.

Once again, it will have to be Democrats that comes to the rescue of ordinary Americans because it seems the Republicans only care about the rich and the corporations.