GOP Moving To Dismantle Medicare
After voting just last week to repeal the landmark health care legislation, House Republicans are on a roll and are now reviving attempts to privatize Medicare. The Associated Press reported today: "House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., is testing support for his idea to replace Medicare with a fixed payment to buy a private medical plan from a menu of coverage options. Party leaders will determine if the so-called voucher plan will be part of the budget Republicans put forward in the spring."Ryan has established a long history of lies, hypocrisy and stealth attempts to attack America's seniors, children and disabled - Media's Responsible Budget Grown-Up Paul Ryan Helped Create Massive Deficits
The idea to privatize Medicare is a significant part of Ryan's "Roadmap for America." As we previously reported, Ryan claimed in his book, Young Guns (written with Reps. Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy), that his "Roadmap" will "secure the future of Social Security and Medicare." However, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), his plan would actually dismantle Medicare:
The Ryan plan would eliminate traditional Medicare, most of Medicaid, and all of the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), converting these health programs largely to vouchers that low-income households, seniors, and people with disabilities could use to help buy insurance in the private health insurance market.
But as the AP article notes, "The amount of the voucher would be based on total current Medicare spending and indexed to grow year by year thereafter. But that growth would be less than the torrid pace of health care inflation now." So basically, each year the vouchers would be worth less and less coverage and "by 2080, Medicare would be cut 76 percent below its projected size under current policies."
In 2009, then-Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and 136 Republicans voted for a GOP budget substitute, sponsored by Ryan, that AP said "eventually would end Medicare as it is presently known" by privatizing the system. Then earlier last year, Boehner tried to distance his party from the Medicare voucher program. Now it looks like Republicans leaders have come around again to the GOP darling's idea and are embracing the plan at the expense of American seniors.
The Flimflam Man
One depressing aspect of American politics is the susceptibility of the political and media establishment to charlatans. You might have thought, given past experience, that D.C. insiders would be on their guard against conservatives with grandiose plans. But no: as long as someone on the right claims to have bold new proposals, he’s hailed as an innovative thinker. And nobody checks his arithmetic.So while Congressional Republicans plan to destroy Medicare and Medicaid, and threatening to close down the government if they do not get their way; they are doing this to actually create an even larger deficit.
Which brings me to the innovative thinker du jour: Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.
Mr. Ryan has become the Republican Party’s poster child for new ideas thanks to his “Roadmap for America’s Future,” a plan for a major overhaul of federal spending and taxes. News media coverage has been overwhelmingly favorable; on Monday, The Washington Post put a glowing profile of Mr. Ryan on its front page, portraying him as the G.O.P.’s fiscal conscience. He’s often described with phrases like “intellectually audacious.”
But it’s the audacity of dopes. Mr. Ryan isn’t offering fresh food for thought; he’s serving up leftovers from the 1990s, drenched in flimflam sauce.
Mr. Ryan’s plan calls for steep cuts in both spending and taxes. He’d have you believe that the combined effect would be much lower budget deficits, and, according to that Washington Post report, he speaks about deficits “in apocalyptic terms.” And The Post also tells us that his plan would, indeed, sharply reduce the flow of red ink: “The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan would cut the budget deficit in half by 2020.”
But the budget office has done no such thing. At Mr. Ryan’s request, it produced an estimate of the budget effects of his proposed spending cuts — period. It didn’t address the revenue losses from his tax cuts.
The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has, however, stepped into the breach. Its numbers indicate that the Ryan plan would reduce revenue by almost $4 trillion over the next decade. If you add these revenue losses to the numbers The Post cites, you get a much larger deficit in 2020, roughly $1.3 trillion.
