Claim: We know that President Obama stole over $500 billion out of Medicare to switch it over to Obamacare.
Verdict: REFUTES

Retrieved passages:
title: Health care reforms proposed during the Obama administration
text: is undetected. According to CBS News, Medicare fraud accounts for an estimated $60 billion in Medicare payments each year, and "has become one of, if not the most profitable, crimes in America." Criminals set up phony companies, then invoice Medicare for fraudulent services provided to valid Medicare patients who never receive the services. These costs appear on the Medicare statements provided to Medicare card holders. The program pays out over $430 billion per year via over 1 billion claims, making enforcement challenging. Its enforcement budget is "extremely limited" according to one Medicare official. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said in

title: Health care reforms proposed during the Obama administration
text: an interview: "Clearly more auditing needs to be done and it needs to be done in real time." The Obama administration is providing Medicare with an additional $200 million to fight fraud as part of its stimulus package, and billions of dollars to computerize medical records and upgrade networks, which should assist Medicare in identifying fraudulent claims. During July 2010, President Obama signed into law the Improper Payments Elimination and Recovery Act of 2010, citing approximately $110 billion in unauthorized payments of all types, including Medicare and Medicaid. President Obama has directed his administration to reduce these payments by $50

title: Health care reforms proposed during the Obama administration
text: However, research also suggests that subsidies alone are unlikely to solve the uninsured problem in the U.S. The Government Accountability Office lists Medicare as a "high-risk" government program due to its vulnerability to improper payments. Estimates of Medicare fraud or "improper payments" vary. The Office of Management and Budget reported that $54 billion in "improper payments" were made to Medicare ($24B), Medicaid ($18B) and Medicaid Advantage ($12B) during FY2009. This was 9.4% of the $573 billion spent in these categories. GAO reported in 2000: "The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General has reported that $13.5 billion

title: Health care reforms proposed during the Obama administration
text: Medicine reported in September 2012 that approximately $750B per year in U.S. health care costs are avoidable or wasted. This included: unnecessary services ($210 billion annually); inefficient delivery of care ($130 billion); excess administrative costs ($190 billion); inflated prices ($105 billion); prevention failures ($55 billion), and fraud ($75 billion). During a June 2009 speech, President Barack Obama outlined his strategy for reform. He mentioned electronic record-keeping, preventing expensive conditions, reducing obesity, refocusing doctor incentives from quantity of care to quality, bundling payments for treatment of conditions rather than specific services, better identifying and communicating the most cost-effective treatments, and reducing

title: Health care reforms proposed during the Obama administration
text: all health care expenditures in the U.S. are fraudulent. In 2011, Medicare and Medicaid made $65 billion in improper payments (including both error and fraud). Government efforts to reduce fraud include $4.2 billion in fraudulent payments recovered by the Department of Justice and the FBI in 2012, longer jail sentences specified by the Affordable Care Act, and Senior Medicare Patrols—volunteers trained to identify and report fraud. The "International Federation of Health Plans" provides a comparative annual survey of costs for drugs, devices and medical services across countries. According to their 2013 report, the U.S. pays considerably more than other countries

title: 2010 Medicaid fraud
text: theft. A scandal surfaced involving a case to defraud the Medicaid and other healthcare programs such as Medicare. With an estimated amount to be stolen totalling $163 million of which $35 million was already acquired by the criminals, it involved more than 50 ethnic Armenians living in the United States who were arrested on October 13, 2010. The operation was run by more than 400 FBI agents. In addition to FBI, IRS and local enforcement agencies in California, Georgia, New Mexico, New York and Ohio were involved in the probe. The Justice Department has already indicted 73 individuals in New

title: Health care reforms proposed during the Obama administration
text: of processed Medicare fee-for-service claim payments for fiscal year 1999 may have been improperly paid for reasons that ranged from inadvertent error to outright fraud and abuse." Fewer than 5% of Medicare claims are audited. CBO reported in October 2014 that it is difficult to quantify healthcare fraud related to government programs. CBO reported that: "According to HHS, since 2009 the HEAT Medicare task force has filed criminal and civil charges against more than 1,700 defendants who falsely billed the Medicare program for more than $5.5 billion." However, false billing is a partial measure of fraud, as much of it

title: Medicare (United States)
text: cost savings. Estimated savings from more effective coordinated care for the dual eligibles range from $125 billion to over $200 billion, mostly by eliminating unnecessary, expensive hospital admissions. Income-relating Medicare premiums Both House Republicans and President Obama proposed increasing the additional premiums paid by the wealthiest people with Medicare, compounding several reforms in the ACA that would increase the number of wealthier individuals paying higher, income-related Part B and Part D premiums. Such proposals are projected to save $20 billion over the course of a decade, and would ultimately result in more than a quarter of Medicare enrollees paying between

title: Economic policy of the Barack Obama administration
text: Medicaid expansion (10 million persons in 2016) and subsidies (approximately 10 million persons received a total of $42 billion in 2016, or about $4,200 each) also served to address after-tax income inequality, by transferring money and providing health insurance to lower-income citizens. A 2016 report from the Obama Administration claimed that "Tax changes enacted since 2009 have boosted the share of after-tax income received by the bottom 99 percent of families by more than the tax changes of any previous Administration since at least 1960." President Obama also attempted to address inequality before taxes (i.e., market income), with an increase

title: America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009
text: in June 2008 that the Medicare program as currently structured is unsustainable without significant reform, as tax revenues dedicated to the program are not sufficient to cover its rapidly increasing expenditures. According to the CBO, spending on Medicare will grow from $485 billion during 2009 to $879 billion by 2018. President Obama said at a White House news conference on July 22 that, without changes, the system is guaranteed "to basically break the federal budget". He argued that it is necessary to cut wasteful spending which is known to exist (over-testing, no IT, lack of co-ordination, hospital re-admissions) in order

title: Executive Order 13813
text: and want insurance that pays for their treatments, they will be out of luck". According to The Economist, Trump’s plans "are likely to end up inflicting the most pain on self-employed, middle- to upper-income folk—in other words, on a Republican constituency". Senator Lamar Alexander and Senator Patty Murray reached a compromise to amend the Affordable Care Act to fund cost cost-sharing reductions. President Trump had stopped paying the cost sharing subsidies and the Congressional Budget Office estimated his action would cost $200 billion, cause insurance sold on the exchange to cost 20% more and cause one million people to lose

title: Implementation history of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
text: 2017. The CBO estimated that the repeal would cause 13 million people to lose their health insurance by 2027. Senator Lamar Alexander and Senator Patty Murray reached a compromise to amend the Affordable Care Act to fund cost cost-sharing reductions. President Trump had stopped paying the cost sharing subsidies and the Congressional Budget Office estimated his action would cost $200 billion, cause insurance sold on the exchange to cost 20% more and cause one million people to lose insurance. The plan will also provide more flexibility for state waivers, allow a new "Copper Plan" or catastrophic coverage for all, allow

title: Economic policy of the Barack Obama administration
text: his tenure, healthcare costs continued to moderate. For example, healthcare premiums for those covered by employers rose by 69% from 2000 to 2005, but only 27% from 2010 to 2015. By 2017, nearly 70% of those on the ACA marketplace exchanges could purchase insurance for less than $75/month after subsidies. The ACA was evaluated multiple times by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which scored it as a moderate deficit reducer, as it included tax hikes primarily on high income taxpayers (roughly the top 5%) and reductions in future Medicare cost increases, offsetting subsidy costs. No Republicans in the House or

title: Healthcare reform debate in the United States
text: in America." Criminals set up phony companies, then invoice Medicare for fraudulent services provided to valid Medicare patients who never receive the services. These costs appear on the Medicare statements provided to Medicare card holders. The program pays out over $430 billion per year via over 1 billion claims, making enforcement challenging. Its enforcement budget is "extremely limited" according to one Medicare official. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said in an interview: "Clearly more auditing needs to be done and it needs to be done in real time." The Obama administration provided Medicare with an additional $200 million to fight

title: Political positions of Barack Obama
text: million people with health insurance via a combination of state healthcare exchanges and an extension of Medicaid. It lowered the rate of those without health insurance from approximately 16% in 2010 to 9% by 2015. Throughout his administration, healthcare costs continued moderating; for example, healthcare premiums for those covered by employers rose by 69% between 2000 and 2005, but only by 27% from 2010 to 2015. By 2017, nearly 70% of those on the exchanges could purchase insurance for less than $75 per month after subsidies. The law was evaluated multiple times by the Congressional Budget Office, which scored it

title: Barack Obama
text: pass legislation reforming health care in the United States, a key campaign promise and a top legislative goal. He proposed an expansion of health insurance coverage to cover the uninsured, to cap premium increases, and to allow people to retain their coverage when they leave or change jobs. His proposal was to spend $900 billion over 10 years and include a government insurance plan, also known as the public option, to compete with the corporate insurance sector as a main component to lowering costs and improving quality of health care. It would also make it illegal for insurers to drop

title: Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
text: the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003." Douglas Holtz-Eakin, CBO director during the George W. Bush administration, who later served as the chief economic policy adviser to U.S. Senator John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, alleged that the bill would increase the deficit by $562 billion because, he argued, it front-loaded revenue and back-loaded benefits. Scheiber and Cohn rejected critical assessments of the law's deficit impact, arguing that predictions were biased towards underestimating deficit reduction. They noted that for example, it is easier to account for the cost of definite levels of subsidies to specified numbers of people than account for savings

title: Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
text: The CBO estimated that the repeal would cause 13 million people to lose their health insurance by 2027. Senator Lamar Alexander and Senator Patty Murray reached a compromise to amend the Affordable Care Act to fund cost cost-sharing reductions. President Trump had stopped paying the cost sharing subsidies and the Congressional Budget Office estimated his action would cost $200 billion, cause insurance sold on the exchange to cost 20% more and cause one million people to lose insurance. The plan will also provide more flexibility for state waivers, allow a new "Copper Plan" or catastrophic coverage for all, allow interstate

title: United States federal budget
text: consistently reported since 2010 that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (also known as "Obamacare") would reduce the deficit, as its tax increases and reductions in future Medicare spending offset its incremental spending for subsidies for low-income households. The CBO reported in June 2015 that "repeal" of the ACA would increase the deficit between $137 billion and $353 billion over the 2016–2025 period in total, depending on the impact of macroeconomic feedback effects. In other words, ACA is a deficit reducer, as its repeal would raise the deficit. The Medicare Trustees provide an annual report of the program's finances.

title: Economic policy of the Barack Obama administration
text: reduction includes, in addition to direct premium savings, the average family's share of the reduction in employer paid health insurance premiums and the reduction in the cost of government health programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. The Associated Press reported in September 2008 that Senator Obama was proposing a National Health Insurance Exchange that would include both private insurance plans and a Medicare-like government run option. Coverage would be guaranteed regardless of health status, and premiums would not vary based on health status either. The campaign estimates the cost of the program at $60 billion annually. The plan requires that