It looks like Andy Griffith isn’t as smart as his lawyer Ben Matlock character, who always unraveled the case as the guilty party sat in the witness dock.
Griffith, as you probably know, has done a TV ad to convince older Americans that the new healthcare system in honky dory. Referencing another Griffith oeuvre, the Daily Caller says that Andy doesn’t know what he is talking about and “sounds more like Deputy Barney Fife than Sheriff Andy Taylor.”
The Daily Caller notes:
The ad is intended to cover up the awful truth confirmed in official reports released by the Obama administration last week. The Medicare payment rates for the doctors and hospitals serving seniors will be cut by 30 percent during the next three years. By 2019, those Medicare payment rates will be lower than under Medicaid, a program in which doctors already are refusing to treat new and sometimes old patients. Thus, under ObamaCare payment rates for Medicare will be only one third of what will be paid by private insurance and only half of what is paid by Medicaid, where as a result of low reimbursement rates the poor often can’t even find access to any care, let alone high quality care.
This pending health care crunch for old people is the result of Obamacare’s $575 billion in cuts to Medicare during the next 10 years ($2.9 trillion over the next 20 years). Indeed, the official report of the Medicare Board of Trustees released last week shows that Medicare Part A (hospital insurance) is ultimately cut by 60 percent; Part B (physician services) is cut by 43 percent.
And here’s the coup de grace (as they say in Mayberry): the ad was made with taxpayer money.