Obama’s released his grand jobs and budget plan.

Obama's plan to Boost Jobs and Cut Costs

You can take a gander at Living Within Our Means and Investing in the Future The President’s Plan for Economic Growth and Deficit Reduction. It’s got details about how the new stimulus plan will be paid for by reducing overpayments from the government for healthcare and shared sacrifice across the board.

I admire the aim of the Affordable Care Act:

In March 2010, the President signed into law the Affordable Care Act, which will cut the deficit by more than $200 billion in its first 10 years and more than $1 trillion in its second, as well as addressing the central driver of our long-term debt: rising health care costs.

I’m inclined to think that “In the medium and long term, we must reduce the deficit and stabilize the debt as a share of the economy in order to put the country on firm fiscal footing” is both admirable and needed. Especially since the plan intends to save $4 Trillion (that’s a number I can’t even fathom, by the way) over the next 10 years. According to the document, this would actually bring us to where “our current spending is no longer adding to our debt.”

Pass This Bill

And just in case you didn’t hear the speech he made, you missed the president asking congress to “pass this bill” at the end of just about every paragraph. But don’t worry if you’re a sucker for repeated phrases, he’s got you covered.

In this document he’s talking about our dimes:

The purpose of the American Jobs Act is simple: put more people back to work, put more money in the pockets of working Americans, and do so without adding a dime to the deficit… … Moreover, the American Jobs Act will not add a dime to the deficit. It includes specific offsets that will, in combination, more than fully pay for its cost.

Personally, it’s not dimes that I’m worried about… It’s those $4 trillion we’ve already talked about. Dimes not so much.

So where are all of these non-existent dimes not being take from? You know, those dimes it’s not going to cost any of us.

To reach these amounts, the President is putting forward a balanced approach that both asks for shared sacrifice from all Americans and draws from across the budget. This should include additional spending cuts in mandatory programs, modest adjustments in important entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, capping spending on Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO), and reforming our tax code so that we ask our biggest corporations and wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share.

The plan incorporates $248 billion in Medicare savings and $73 billion in Medicaid savings over the next 10 years. Oh and in the next 1o years after that, they’re planning on cutting another trillion dollars off that. Yep. A cool trillion.

That’s a lot of money being taken away from healthcare. And I can only imagine who’s pockets is going to effect the most. Yep. You guess it: nurses. We make up the largest part of the healthcare workforce, so I fear it will hit us the hardest.

They state they will do this without slashing any benefits to seniors, persons with disabilities, or low-income families. But I couldn’t find a paragraph in there anywhere about how this might effect healthcare providers and their families. Guess that’s part of the shared sacrifice thing.

They’re going to do it by taking away additional Medicare incentives for teaching hospitals. This could potentially make placing students more of a challenge. They’re also going to do it by “cutting waste, fraud, and abuse of Medicare.” And let me tell you right now, I’d like to smack the folks who are abusing Medicare right in the head. You are seriously making its dang-near impossible for the rest of us to ever see any reimbursement from them.

So stop it. Seriously.

image: conservativepapers.com

They’re also going to add a whole bunch of other obstacles and hurdles to facilitate care, like prior authorizations for imaging and other fun stuff. You know, the sort of things we need in healthcare to make providing care way more efficient and cost-effect: more regulations, rules, and of course a big-fat reduction in the compensation we can hope to receive for providing a higher level of care.

So here’s what the government says:

They are going to pay less money, for more service, and we’d better do it in half the time. We also better ask permission before we do it.

If we don’t, and we don’t file it electronically, appropriately, and while standing on one foot and spinning around 3 times (ok… I made that part up) then we’ll not see a dime… Hey!

There’s we’re all those non-existent dimes are coming from: healthcare!