Remember that infamous $716 billion in Medicare cuts that
featured big in Mitt Romney's campaign, even though his running mate Rep. Paul Ryan included the same cuts in his big budget? Well, there's a reason the Medicare cuts died as a Republican attack on Obamacare, and it's not just because Romney lost. It's because those cuts haven't destroyed Medicare, or harmed anyone enrolled in Medicare, or even hurt Medicare Advantage, the federally subsidized private insurance plans that sustained the cuts.
Far from it.
Four years later, with the ACA in place, it appears that worries about the future of Medicare Advantage have not come to fruition — at least not yet. The program is more popular than ever. Between 2010 and 2013, enrollment in the program increased 30%, defying the expectations of some of the top policy experts in Washington. [...]
“So far, the concerns have not been borne out,” says Tricia Neuman, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation who studies Medicare Advantage. “Enrollment continues to climb. Some of the forecasts have predicted that plans would pull out and people would drop out — so far it hasn’t happened.”
When Medicare open enrollment begins on Oct. 15, the approximately 14 million seniors who choose Medicare Advantage will find options that are, in many cases, better and only marginally more expensive than in the past. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees Medicare, the average Medicare Advantage monthly premium will increase only $1.64 in 2014, compared with in 2013.
This is reality, so it doesn't mean that Republicans won't try to drag the cuts back into the 2014 campaign, because you know they're not going to stop campaigning against Obamacare and they're not going to stop trying to scare old people. Scaring old people is the foundation of any Republican campaign. But they'll probably have a harder time convincing those same old people that the Democrats are the bad guys after the Republican default has taken their Social Security checks away.