AARP Shills for White House on ObamaCare
For most of last year, AARP was the White House’s designated huckster with lawmakers to pass ObamaCare through the Congress. Today ObamaCare is the law of the land, and AARP has become the White House shill with older Americans, hawking ObamaCare like some kind of midway carnie to convince seniors that AARP and ObamaCare work for them.
In fact, AARP works for the White House and on behalf of its own high-paid staff, not its members. ObamaCare works for the liberal politicians and the government-corporate-nonprofit healthcare complex, which is comprised of big government bureaucracies, labor unions, AARP, Big Pharma and big insurance companies. ObamaCare is a bait-and-switch snare designed to distract old people with token benefit enrichments while the structural changes to Medicare will ration healthcare to old people, put them out in the cold and into an early grave.
No Longer Working for its Members, AARP Now Works for Obama
Support SSI to PROTECT America’s Seniors
The best evidence of AARP’s treachery toward its members was their full-throated support of ObamaCare’s $500 billion cuts to Medicare. According to Heritage Foundation research by Bob Moffit, “Medicare Advantage plans, which currently attract almost one in four seniors, will see enrollment cut roughly in half over the next 10 years”— this despite repeated assurances by President Obama that, “No matter what you’ve heard, if you like your physician or your current healthcare plan, you can keep it.”
Far from being able to keep their current healthcare plan, many senior citizens will be forced to leave their Medicare Advantage plans and become more dependent on traditional Medicare. That is to say, seniors will have less generous benefit packages, fewer healthcare choices, and they will be herded into less desirable Medicare Supplemental Insurance plans, which not coincidently are the staple of AARP’s billion-dollar insurance empire.
AARP’s Medicare Supplemental Insurance products have had an increasingly difficult time competing with Medicare Advantage plans in recent years. So, in the name of “working for seniors,” AARP worked with the White House to feather its own corporate nest by using the power of the federal government to demolish its Medicare Advantage competitor.
The White House has even gone as far as to take out $700,000 in national advertisements in which Andy Griffith discusses how Medicare will operate under the new law. The administration is grasping at straws to improve the embarrassingly low levels of support that Obamacare receives from seniors.
No Longer Working for its Members, AARP Now Works for Obama
Support SSI to PROTECT America’s Seniors
AARP’s propaganda campaign to snooker the elderly into compliance while they are driven unceremoniously into AARP’s insurance sweet spot is brazen and deceptive. For example, AARP’s communications director in Ohio has been vocally insisting, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the changes taking place in Medicare under ObamaCare are only to benefit seniors:
“This new law gives seniors and their families greater savings, better benefits and higher-quality health care. That’s why it ensures accountability throughout the system so that seniors have greater control over the care that they receive. And that’s why it keeps Medicare strong and solvent – today and tomorrow.”
The facts are exactly the opposite. With an unfunded obligation of at least $86 trillion, Medicare is insolvent today by any standard measure of financial soundness, and it only gets worse under ObamaCare; With the destruction of Medicare Advantage and the new rules to limit care and restrict doctor reimbursement, seniors will have fewer choices and less control over their healthcare; and the quality of healthcare will inevitably deteriorate, not improve, under the enormous pressures on doctors and healthcare providers that will be set in motion under ObamaCare. While AARP attempts to lull seniors into placid compliance with the new healthcare regime, healthcare rationing looms ominously out of sight just around the bend.
In fact, the prospect of healthcare rationing and restricted choice is not merely an abstraction looming in the future; the injurious effects of ObamaCare on seniors already are being felt.
No Longer Working for its Members, AARP Now Works for Obama
Support SSI to PROTECT America’s Seniors
Doctors already are fleeing Medicare because of the anticipated fee-reimbursement squeeze they will face under ObamaCare. As Galen Institute healthcare expert Grace-Marie Turner reports, there is a flood of physicians hiring financial planners to restructure their finances so they can retire in 2013, the year before ObamaCare’s main provisions take effect. Why? Because come January 2011 physician reimbursement under Medicare is scheduled to be axed by 30 percent. Since Medicare payments hardly cover doctors’ costs now, many physicians will end up losing money on every patient they treat. The American Osteopathic Association, for example, reports that only about 40 percent of their physician members will continue seeing their current Medicare patients if these cuts occur.
In the past, when AARP spoke, senior citizens and Members of Congress listened carefully because everyone thought AARP worked for and spoke on behalf of its members. Today we know better. When AARP president Barry Rand moves his lips to speak, it’s President Barack Obama pulling the strings and throwing his voice.
AARP has evolved into nothing more than an arm of the Democratic Party and this administration in particular. They have sold out their members in supporting a healthcare plan that seniors vehemently oppose, and their opposition is for good reason. Obamacare will cripple Medicare, overburden an already broken Medicaid, ration health care and push millions of Americans off their private insurance. Please continue to support SSI as we do everything in our power to protect America’s seniors.
Sincerely,
Lawrence A. Hunter, Ph.D.
President