Obama Says He Remains Committed To Elimination of MA Plans, Reforms to Entitlement Programs

President-elect Barack Obama on Sunday in an interview on ABC's "This Week" said that, although the current economic recession will not allow him to fulfill some campaign promises, he remains committed to the elimination of Medicare Advantage plans, CQ Politics reports. According to Obama, MA plans are an example of government initiatives that do not work, and the plans should receive lower payments.

Obama said, "We are spending a lot of money subsidizing the insurance companies around something called Medicare Advantage, a program that gives them subsidies to accept Medicare recipients but doesn't necessarily make people on Medicare healthier." He added that the elimination of MA plans in combination with other efforts to reduce costs could provide as much as $200 billion to spend on expansion of health care. Obama said, "What our challenge is going to be is identifying what works and putting more money into that, eliminating things that don't work, and making things that we have more efficient."

In response to a question about whether he would follow through on a campaign promise to repeal tax cuts for higher-income U.S. residents to fund a health care reform efforts, Obama "hedged," according to CQ Politics. He said that a provision to promote health information technology in an economic stimulus package under development by Democrats would eliminate some waste and duplication in the health care system. Obama said, "I want to be realistic here -- not everything that we talked about during the campaign are we going to be able to do on the pace that we had hoped" (Bettelheim, CQ Politics, 1/11).

In addition, Obama promised reforms to entitlement programs to help address the current federal budget deficit, but he "offered no clues about what specific changes he would make to the vast entitlement programs with future obligations -- particularly in Medicare -- that threaten to place enormous financial constraints on future generations," the Boston Globe reports (Wangsness, Boston Globe, 1/12).

A transcript of the interview is available online.