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06-27-2012, 08:58 AM
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Fatal
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bucco
I doubt if anyone wants to really learn about the Ryan plan... but just in case somebody actually wants to know something..
"Last time around, it was Ryan’s Medicare proposal that got the most attention—and, over time, that caused Republicans the most political grief. Instead of preserving the traditional government insurance program, Ryan had proposed that, starting ten years from now, the government would give seniors vouchers with which they could buy private coverage. He promised to keep the old program in place, for seniors who were already on it, and he promised to regulate the private market so that all seniors could still get coverage. But, over time, the value of the voucher would likely have diminished relative to the cost of medical care—producing the huge budget savings Ryan wanted, in part to pay for tax cuts, but also leaving seniors exposed to much larger medical bills. The Congressional Budget Office determined that, by 2022, the typical senior 65-year-old be responsible for two-thirds of his or her medical costs.
Ryan has stepped away from that plan, although not by as much as you may have heard. He’s still calling for turning Medicare into a voucher program that would not make the same guarantees of benefits, for example. The difference is that traditional Medicare would remain as an option for seniors, even beyond the next decade. He also envisions the voucher growing a little more rapidly. That, combined with newly revised projects that suggest the cost of health care is growing less rapidly than anticipated, would likely give seniors more protection than the first Ryan budget did. In these respects, it's similar to the bipartisan Medicare framework Ryan put together with Senator Ron Wyden, the Democrat from Oregon.
But Ryan's new plan would still leave seniors more vulnerable than they are now—and more vulnerable they'd be even under Obama's latest, most aggressive proposal for cutting Medicare cuts. Chief among the reasons: Even the new Ryan vouchers wouldn't guarantee access to a set of benefits. If costs rise faster than the value of the vouchers, as they very well might, seniors would have to make up the difference themselves.
Still, it’s not the Medicare population that takes the biggest hit this time. It's the Medicaid population. For starters—and this was the very first thing Ryan mentioned at his press conference—Ryan would repeal the coverage expansions of the Affordable Care Act. This is old news, I know. But few people seem to appreciate the impact. Take away the Affordable Care Act and you take away insurance from the 30 million people who are supposed to have it come 2014, when the law goes into full effect. About half of them are supposed to get that coverage from Medicaid.
Now throw in Ryan’s proposal to convert Medicaid into a block grant, under which the federal government would no longer guarantee insurance coverage for everybody that meets eligibility standards. Instead, the government would simply write checks to the states, for predetermined amounts, and let them figure out how best to spend the money. To generate the savings his budget needs, he’d reduce the value of those grants over time, relative to health care costs and current projections.
"Ryan claims that, given the freedom to innovate, states will find more efficient ways to stretch their dollars. But Medicaid already costs less, apples to apples, than private health insurance. And even to the extent states could find new efficiencies—and I'm willing to believe that at least some could—those wouldn’t be enough to replace the dollars Ryan wants to take out of the Medicaid system. Ryan proposes to reduce the program’s funding by more than $800 billion over the next decade, above and beyond the reduction that comes with repealing the Affordable Care Act. According to the Center on Budget, the result would be funding 22 percent below what it is now. (See figure at left.) And the cut would grow over time. “Another way to look at it,” says Edwin Park, of the Center on Budget, is that “in 2040, measured as a percentage of the economy, Medicaid/CHIP spending will be half the levels they are today—when there is no coverage expansion and not taking into account aging of the population and rising health care costs.”
Altogether, the CBO says, spending on Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and subsidies for private insurance would be nearly 75 percent lower in 2050 than projected under current law. (See figure below, from the CBO report.) Let that sink in for a minute: Ryan wants to reduce the government’s investment in helping people get health insurance by three-quarters. It’s impossible to know exactly how such a cut would play out, at least right now, but when the Kaiser Family Foundation asked the Urban Institute to project the impact of last year’s block grant proposal, it determined that between 14 and 27 million people would lose insurance.
Could such a proposal ever get through Congress? Probably not. Those numbers are as fantastical as the one on discretionary spending. But Ryan's willingness to endorse such plans says something. As Ed Kilgore and Ezra Klein observe, the decision to shift the burden of cuts so that the poor feel relatively more of them is no accident. The Republican base these days is disproportionately white and old, which means it’s more willing to tolerate cut to programs that seem mostly to benefit non-white, non-old people. In fact, left-wing polemics about Ryan’s insensitivity to the poor—like the one you are reading, for example—may not bother the base that much."
Jonathan Cohn: The Stunning Immorality Of Paul Ryan
My suggestion is that if you REALLY want to know things, read and not the political slanted crap.....because you guys that come on here and make false claims make yourselves look silly !
You have to read it all and keep it in context. The sites are slanted and bias and there you will only have what your party wants you to have
AND remember NOTHING is perfect but if the lying and backroom stuff stops things can get done |
Thanks for posting this, Bucco. It presents some statistics that people who just blindly embrace the Ryan proposal almost certainly don't know.
And it matches my own personal experience with healthcare premiums. A long, long time ago the bank I worked for in Chicago announced that it would generously and finally fund the healthcare insurance for retirees with monthly additions to their retirement payments amounting to $300 per month. The bank would then stop paying the retiree healthcare premiums, avoiding the future risk of increasing preiums from the insurance companies. At the time, the monthly premiums were about $175. It sounded like a generous offer at the time. The premiums increased to more than that amount within 3-4 years. By the time I retired early, I was paying over $1,000 a month until I turned 65 and qualified for Medicare. And now I pay a multiple of that amount for a supplemental policy.
The Ryan voucher program is a terrible idea. I hope enough people read enough to realize that rather than just voting the way their partisan "soundbite-makers" or the political attack ads tell them to. But even if they don't I can't imagine that this plan will ever see the light of day in a Congress concentrated on re-election. A voucher program really would be a politically-fatal "third rail".
Now let the criticisms of the "left leaning Congressional Budget Office" begin.
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