Bonamici & Blumenauer support $500 billion cut from Medicare

Cornilles for Congress

Why would an eight-term Member of Congress who has been in elected office since 1972 hold a partisan press conference and accuse a small business owner from Tualatin of playing “politics as usual?”

Your guess is as good as mine. But, after forty years as a career politician, Senator Suzanne Bonamici’s surrogate, Congressman Earl Blumenauer, would certainly know a thing or two about politics as usual. And there he was at his party headquarters last Friday falsely suggesting that Rob Cornilles wants to create a private option for seniors in Medicare.

Perhaps Congressman Blumenauer should spend less time in partisan press conferences and more time in his House committee, which has jurisdiction over Medicare. If he did, he’d know that Medicare already provides seniors with a private option called Medicare Advantage and that 254,000 Oregon seniors choose that option over traditional Medicare. Why does he not acknowledge this?

Probably because he and Senator Bonamici both support the Affordable Care Act, which cut $500 billion from Medicare, the largest cut coming from the Medicare Advantage program.  According to Medicare’s own Chief Actuary, these cuts could force half of those Oregon seniors out of the health plan they chose and increase out-of-pocket expenses for the others by nearly $473 next year and $892 by 2018.

Now that’s certainly a record we understand he and Senator Bonamici would want to run from.