I guess I could quote you sources from my side of the isle for you to disregard and we could go back and forth endlessly, instead I'll approach it with some simple common sense.
First off, I think you'll agree that neither of us have concrete figures on the total cost or savings of diverting funds from medicare to Obamacare. Now I do know that doctors and hospitals negotiate discount Medicare and Medicaid rates with the federal government and I think you will also agree that there is not an abundance of those doctors and hospitals who are willing to participate in these programs when they can make a lot more money in the private sector. With that said, we either mandate hospitals, doctors, nurses, medical techs etc to work for lower wages or, we pass the extra costs on to the tax payers who are already liable for over $13trillion as it is!
Beenthere, you know what small regard I hold for common sense, common sense to my way of thinking is simply lazy reasoning. Common sense says that the world is flat, and it took uncommon comitment, reasoning and exploration to discover the realty.
However:
No, neither of us are privy to the specific figures, and I also am unwilling to delve into the numbers even if I thought I had the wherewithall to comprehend them.
We are not talking about doctors and hospitals herer Beenthere, we are talking about insurance companies that made deals with goernment, firstly that they were paid above and beyond what was required in order to take on factions of government sponsored health care. Accordingly, they were willing to give up these inducements when they were assured that they would have a much larger pool of payers when all was said and done.
I am talking specificaly about the 716 billion (or what ever the exact number is) that Romney claims Obama took from medicare in order to fund his program. Now there are other facts here, the first being that no matter where he got that money, he placed it back into the resource pool. There are recipients in one class or another for all of that money. In short, the sick and or the old are getting the money in the form of care. Romney plans to take that money from the recipients themselves and pitch it to another class that is not sick. That class may be the rich and it may be tax payers as a whole that is the true definition of "gutting". Romney is, in this case, is either lying or does not know the true nature of his plan. Either one is unacceptabel to me.
If you wish though, I will look to see if I can find something that will at least explain it better than I have.