Letter: Candidate approves advertisements containing falsehoods

Rick Berg is not being truthful about Obamacare and its effect on Medicare.

Berg gets his mother to say that the Affordable Care Act cuts benefits to regular Medicare beneficiaries by $500 billion. This is factually untrue and Berg knows it. His mother says she depends upon Medicare and that stopping those cuts is why her son is running for the Senate. She says that Heidi Heitkamp supports these cuts and thus she must be stopped and Obamacare repealed.

These falsehoods appear in another of Berg’s advertisements that show a group of Medicare-age women complaining in a similar fashion.

We can know Berg’s statements are untrue by simply looking at what prominent insurance experts have said. For example, the elected Republican Kansas Insurance Commissioner Sandy Praeger has just released on the Kansas website www.ksinsurance.org the “truth” about the Affordable Care Act and its positive (not negative) effect on Medicare in her just published “Commissioner’s Corner” for August.

As have so many experts who have studied the Affordable Care Act, Praeger has gone on record in her role as a public servant and not as a politician and explained that the act does not cut benefits to regular Medicare beneficiaries but rather the opposite — its goal is to save $500 billion over the next 10 years. How is this possible?

Praeger and others have explained that the savings is to come from reducing planned increases to Medicare providers, reducing federal payments to insurers that have sold Medicare Advantage plans (which are regular Medicare plans that offer costly extra insurer benefits that will now be eliminated), and by aggressive new actions meant to reduce fraud, waste and abuse.

How can Berg try and make us believe that these savings are a bad thing?

For any truth coming from Berg, look elsewhere.

Greg Stites, Bismarck

Tags: rick berg, opinion, letter, letters