Reply #47: Where? The person I responded to says most of that money from Medicare fraud

[slipslidingaway]

will be used to pay for the HC bill, IMO any savings from the Medicare program should stay in Medicare.


http://cbo.gov/ftpdocs/108xx/doc10868/12-23-Trust_Fund_Accounting.pdf
http://cbo.gov/ftpdocs/108xx/doc10868/12-23-HI_TF_memo.pdf


CBO suggests Democrats are double-counting Medicare savings

http://www.examiner.com/x-28973-Essex-County-Conservative-Examiner~y2009m12d23-CBO-suggests-Democrats-are-doublecounting-Medicare-savings

"The CBO letter suggests that the projected savings to Medicare are largely illusory, especially if Congress plans to both continue to finance Medicare through 2017 and beyond, and also fund expanded health-care coverage.

In fact, in a significant departure from the usual non-argumentative language that the CBO uses, the CBO actually used the phrase "double-counting" to describe the assumptions that the Senate's plan makes (emphasis added):

The key point is that the savings to the HI trust fund under the PPACA would be received by the government only once, so they cannot be set aside to pay for future Medicare spending and, at the same time, pay for current spending on other parts of the legislation or on other programs. Trust fund accounting shows the magnitude of the savings within the trust fund, and those savings indeed improve the solvency of that fund; however, that accounting ignores the burden that would be faced by the rest of the government later in redeeming the bonds held by the trust fund. Unified budget accounting shows that the majority of the HI trust fund savings would be used to pay for other spending under the PPACA and would not enhance the ability of the government to redeem the bonds credited to the trust fund to pay for future Medicare benefits. To describe the full amount of HI trust fund savings as both improving the government’s ability to pay future Medicare benefits and financing new spending outside of Medicare would essentially double-count a large share of those savings and thus overstate the improvement in the government’s fiscal position...."