Chart of the day

With all the talk of Medicare, the truly brutal Romney cuts to Medicaid have been largely ignored.  Kevin Drum posts a nice chart showing what’s at stake:

And some very on-point commentary:

But that’s not all. In this case, there’s more than ideology at work: Romney doesn’t want to spend as much on Medicaid as Obama does. In fact, he wants to take a chainsaw to it. Aaron Carroll and Austin Frakt took a look at the Romney and Obama plans in the Journal of the American Medical Association this week, and the chart above shows their conclusions. On Medicare, the two candidates want to spend roughly similar amounts of money. On Medicaid, Romney wants to spend way, way less. And not just on poor people.As Jon Cohn points out, cuts of this size will have a huge impact on “dual eligibles,” elderly patients who rely on Medicaid to pay their nursing home bills. This is not a minor point of technocratic disagreement. It represents a massive change in our commitment to providing decent medical care for those who can least afford it. Medicaid, much more than Medicare, demonstrates what’s really at stake in November’s election.

Then again, those people who cannot afford decent medical care on their own are moochers, takers, (and of course, disabled people with genetic diseases), etc., and probably just deserve to die anyway.

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