Letter to the editor: Conrad ignores reality of moving program funds

I am having difficulty understanding exactly what Sen. Kent Conrad perceives as “a huge amount of money” in his statements reported in The Jamestown Sun Aug. 24. First he refers to $1.3 trillion as a huge amount of money, then gives the same description to $650 million. The former amount is a politically-motivated calculation with questionable basis in reality. The latter amount would seem to be for a good purpose, adjusting unfair repayment rates from Medicare to rural hospitals and providers, which are indeed underpaid. Ironically, the equally “huge amount of money” our retiring senator from New Hampshire conveniently ignores is the $710 billion that his vaunted Affordable Health Care Act strips from Medicare and reassigns to Medicaid for the benefit of health care to people who have mostly not contributed anything to any program, and takes from the Social Security trust fund, which has been paid into by our seniors for their entire working careers. The president’s justification for the shifting of funds? We will “save money by adjusting payments to hospitals and insurance companies.”

So we are paying more money to hospitals, but we are then going to save by giving them less money? This stretches credulity well past the breaking point. The bottom line here is that the $1.3 trillion is a huge fabrication, the $650 million used to be considered a huge amount of money, but is in reality less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the $710 billion that is absolutely going to be taken from an already stripped-bare trust fund. I don’t call this last amount “huge,” I call it shameful and unconscionable. Go home to New Hampshire, Conrad! We don’t need your values here.

Robert Craig

Jamestown

Tags: opinion, letters, politics