On December 2, 2003, the AARP began running advertisements in national newspapers citing eight benefits of the final Medicare legislation that the President signed into law on December 8. The ad’s headline states that the ad contains “no sound bites… no spin…. no politics… just the facts.”
The following is an analysis of the ad’s claims.1 It should be noted that some of the problematic aspects of the legislation that relate to low-income Medicare beneficiaries and the premium support demonstration, which are described below, would have been more problematic without AARP’s use of its influence to soften the adverse effects of those provisions.