Seniors, Are You Paying Attention To Paul Ryan’s Medicare Plan?
Tea Party members who railed against health care reform because of the spin they were sold about how “Obamacare” would affect Medicare played a big role in returning the House of Representatives to Republican control.
I’m betting that many of them, if they’re paying attention to what Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin), wants to do to the Medicare program, are having some serious buyer’s remorse. If Democrats are wise, they’re already drafting a strategy to remind Medicare beneficiaries, including card-carrying Tea Party members, just how fooled they were into thinking that Republicans were the protectors of the government-run program they hold so dear.
As a speaker at an especially contentious town hall meeting during the summer of 2009, I saw firsthand just how many senior citizens were snookered about how reform legislation would alter Medicare. Shortly after I testified before Congress about how the insurance industry was conducting a behind-the-scenes campaign to influence public opinion about reform, Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-New Jersey) invited me to share my perspective as a former insurance industry insider at his September 3, 2009, town hall meeting at Montclair State University.
More than 1,000 people had crammed into the school’s auditorium, not so much to hear the speakers as to express their opinions. Reform opponents were on one side of the auditorium, and reform advocates were on the other side. I had to shout just to be heard above the insults the groups were hurling at each other. Many of the reform opponents were carrying signs that read, “Hands Off My Medicare!” They clearly had bought the lie that the Democrats planned to dismantle the program.
There was no doubt in my mind that the insurance industry was the original source of that lie. While insurers liked the part of reform that would require all Americans not eligible for Medicare or Medicaid to buy coverage from them, they did not like the provision that would eliminate the overpayments the federal government has been paying private insurers for years to participate in the Medicare Advantage program, which was created when Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress in the late 1990s.
A little history: A provision of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, written primarily by the insurance industry and backed by House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, gave Medicare beneficiaries the option of getting their benefits through private insurers. Republicans envisioned this as the first step toward the total privatization of Medicare.
The Insurance Industry’s Government Favor
The problem was that insurers were reluctant to jump in unless they could be assured of a substantial profit. To get them to market Medicare Advantage plans, the government agreed to give them a big bonus. As a result, we the taxpayers now pay private insurers 14 percent more than the per-patient cost of the traditional Medicare program. These overpayments have contributed significantly to the record profits insurance companies have been posting in recent years, even though only 22 percent of people eligible for Medicare have bought what they’re selling.
The insurers were not able to keep the Democrat-controlled Congress of 2010 from eliminating those bonuses when they passed the Affordable Care Act. The law will indeed reduce future Medicare spending — not benefits — by an estimated $500 million over the next 10 years in a variety of ways, one of which is to stop overpaying insurers. This means that they will not get an extra $136 billion that they — and their shareholders — had been counting on, and they’re really bummed about that.
Knowing they fare much better when the GOP is running things on Capitol Hill, they devoted millions of the premium dollars we paid them to help elect more Republicans to Congress.
An Insurer-Funded Misinformation Campaign
The insurers funneled millions of dollars to their business allies and front groups in an effort to convince the American public that the Democrats wanted to cut Medicare benefits. Not only is that not true, but the new law actually adds an important new benefit and greatly improves another. For the first time, Medicare now pays for preventive care. And the law closes the hated “doughnut hole” in the Medicare prescription drug program.
But thanks to the success of the insurer-funded misinformation campaign, many seniors went to the polls last November convinced that the Democrats not only had created death panels in the Medicare program, they had also slashed their benefits.
The insurance industry funneled $86 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to pay for TV ads that charged that the new law would “cut Medicare.” Also joining in on the campaign of lies was the 60 Plus Association, a group that, according to the Washington Post, AARP and other sources, has received the lion’s share of its funding over the years from the pharmaceutical industry and other special interests.
The 60 Plus Association ran TV ads in numerous congressional districts last fall against Democrats who had voted for the reform law. The ads were amazingly effective. Most of the Democrats they targeted lost.
The irony, of course, is that the GOP had no intention of preserving Medicare as seniors have known it since it was created more than 45 years ago. Ryan’s plan to reduce the deficit — which was approved by the House last week — would complete the privatization of Medicare that insurers and their Republican allies have been plotting for years.
The Republican Effort to Kill Medicare: a Losing Proposition
Ryan wants to give Medicare beneficiaries a voucher they can use to get coverage from a private insurance company. Initially, the vouchers would enable beneficiaries to get coverage comparable to what they have today. But the value of the vouchers would diminish over time. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that 65-year-olds would be paying 68 percent of their Medicare coverage costs by 2030, compared with 25 percent today.
What this means is that almost all Medicare beneficiaries would eventually be woefully underinsured, just as an estimated 25 million younger Americans already are and just as most of the nation’s elderly — the ones who could afford coverage at all — were before Medicare was enacted in 1965. (Most senior citizens had no health coverage before Medicare because insurance companies refused to sell it to them. That’s why it was so urgently needed.)
Ryan’s plan is a losing proposition for just about every American who lives long enough to qualify for Medicare benefits, but it is the business model that insurance firms have been dreaming of for years. It would enable them to reap profits that would make their earnings today pale by comparison.
If Democrats have any hope of keeping control of the Senate and regaining the House, they better be able to explain what’s really going on in ways that even the Tea Party seniors will understand. If I were a Democratic strategist, I would be ordering enough “Hands Off My Medicare” signs to blanket the country.
By: Wendell Potter, Center for Media and Democracy, April 18, 2011
No More Civility: Bipartisanship In “Republican-Speak” Is Code For Tax Cuts For The Wealthy
Last week, President Obama offered a spirited defense of his party’s values — in effect, of the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society. Immediately thereafter, as always happens when Democrats take a stand, the civility police came out in force. The president, we were told, was being too partisan; he needs to treat his opponents with respect; he should have lunch with them, and work out a consensus.
That’s a bad idea. Equally important, it’s an undemocratic idea.
Let’s review the story so far.
Two weeks ago, House Republicans released their big budget proposal, selling it to credulous pundits as a statement of necessity, not ideology — a document telling America What Must Be Done.
But it was, in fact, a deeply partisan document, which you might have guessed from the opening sentence: “Where the president has failed, House Republicans will lead.” It hyped the danger of deficits, yet even on its own (not at all credible) accounting, spending cuts were used mainly to pay for tax cuts rather than deficit reduction. The transparent and obvious goal was to use deficit fears to impose a vision of small government and low taxes, especially on the wealthy.
So the House budget proposal revealed a yawning gap between the two parties’ priorities. And it revealed a deep difference in views about how the world works.
When the proposal was released, it was praised as a “wonk-approved” plan that had been run by the experts. But the “experts” in question, it turned out, were at the Heritage Foundation, and few people outside the hard right found their conclusions credible. In the words of the consulting firm Macroeconomic Advisers — which makes its living telling businesses what they need to know, not telling politicians what they want to hear — the Heritage analysis was “both flawed and contrived.” Basically, Heritage went all in on the much-refuted claim that cutting taxes on the wealthy produces miraculous economic results, including a surge in revenue that actually reduces the deficit.
By the way, Heritage is always like this. Whenever there’s something the G.O.P. doesn’t like — say, environmental protection — Heritage can be counted on to produce a report, based on no economic model anyone else recognizes, claiming that this policy would cause huge job losses. Correspondingly, whenever there’s something Republicans want, like tax cuts for the wealthy or for corporations, Heritage can be counted on to claim that this policy would yield immense economic benefits.
The point is that the two parties don’t just live in different moral universes, they also live in different intellectual universes, with Republicans in particular having a stable of supposed experts who reliably endorse whatever they propose.
So when pundits call on the parties to sit down together and talk, the obvious question is, what are they supposed to talk about? Where’s the common ground?
Eventually, of course, America must choose between these differing visions. And we have a way of doing that. It’s called democracy.
Now, Republicans claim that last year’s midterms gave them a mandate for the vision embodied in their budget. But last year the G.O.P. ran against what it called the “massive Medicare cuts” contained in the health reform law. How, then, can the election have provided a mandate for a plan that not only would preserve all of those cuts, but would go on, over time, to dismantle Medicare completely?
For what it’s worth, polls suggest that the public’s priorities are nothing like those embodied in the Republican budget. Large majorities support higher, not lower, taxes on the wealthy. Large majorities — including a majority of Republicans — also oppose major changes to Medicare. Of course, the poll that matters is the one on Election Day. But that’s all the more reason to make the 2012 election a clear choice between visions.
Which brings me to those calls for a bipartisan solution. Sorry to be cynical, but right now “bipartisan” is usually code for assembling some conservative Democrats and ultraconservative Republicans — all of them with close ties to the wealthy, and many who are wealthy themselves — and having them proclaim that low taxes on high incomes and drastic cuts in social insurance are the only possible solution.
This would be a corrupt, undemocratic way to make decisions about the shape of our society even if those involved really were wise men with a deep grasp of the issues. It’s much worse when many of those at the table are the sort of people who solicit and believe the kind of policy analyses that the Heritage Foundation supplies.
So let’s not be civil. Instead, let’s have a frank discussion of our differences. In particular, if Democrats believe that Republicans are talking cruel nonsense, they should say so — and take their case to the voters.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, April 17, 2011
Remember When The GOP Hated Medicare Cuts?
You’ve seen hypocrisy in politics before. But rarely have you seen the brazen kind Republicans just showed on the House floor, when they voted for Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity.”
Ryan’s budget calls for repealing most of the Affordable Care Act, including both the insurance coverage expansions and creation of an independent board to help restrain Medicare costs. But it would leave in place the rest of the planned reductions in Medicare spending, at least for the next ten years. Among those cuts are $136 billion in reductions to Medicare Advantage plans.
As you may know, Medicare Advantage plans are the private insurance alternative, already in existence, for seniors who prefer to opt out of the traditional, government-run insurance plan. About a quarter of all seniors now use them. The government pays insurers a fee for every senior who enrolls, but studies have shown the government is paying too much. That’s how supporters of the Affordable Care Act have justified the $136 billion reduction.
Throughout the health care debate, Republicans not only rejected these and other arguments for Medicare cuts. They made the cuts a centerpiece of their attacks on Democrats, as the Associated Press noted recently:
“The new law’s massive Medicare cuts will fall squarely on the backs of seniors, millions of whom will be forced off their current Medicare coverage,” the GOP wrote in their Pledge to America, an election-season manifesto. …
In addition to the Pledge to America, House Speaker John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and individual Republican candidates all criticized the cuts.
The National Republican Congressional Committee featured them in ads attacking Democrats in numerous campaign commercials, and some individual candidates made use of the cuts as well.
Ryan and his supporters claim the Medicare reductions in the new Republican budget are different, because Democrats used their cuts to finance more government spending. And that’s partially true. Although Democrats bolstered Medicare drug coverage and arguably put in place policies that will lead to higher quality care, they used the bulk of the saved Medicare money to offset the cost of subsidizing insurance for working-age Americans.
But, by the same logic, Republicans are also diverting most of the Medicare Advantage money away from Medicare. They’re using that money to underwrite the cost of tax cuts for the wealthy.
So Democrats are cutting Medicare to make sure everybody has health insurance, while Republicans are cutting Medicare to make sure millionaires have tax cuts. This is really an argument the Republicans want to make?
By: Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic, April 15, 2011
Lucy, Charlie Brown And Football: The Politics Of Personal Grievance
Congressional Republicans all but dared President Obama to engage in a fiscal debate on their terms, demanding to know whether and how he’d tackle long-term debt reduction. The president agreed and presented a credible, realistic plan to cut $4 trillion from the debt over 12 years.
GOP officials obviously weren’t going to like his vision, but I’m a little surprised they’re still whining that Obama was mean to them.
The three Republican congressmen saw it as a rare ray of sunshine in Washington’s stormy budget battle: an invitation from the White House to hear President Obama lay out his ideas for taming the national debt.
They expected a peace offering, a gesture of goodwill aimed at smoothing a path toward compromise. But soon after taking their seats at George Washington University on Wednesday, they found themselves under fire for plotting “a fundamentally different America” from the one most Americans know and love.
“What came to my mind was: Why did he invite us?” Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.) said in an interview Thursday. “It’s just a wasted opportunity.”
Paul Ryan was reportedly “furious” and complained that the speech “was extremely political, very partisan.”
It’s worth fleshing this out, because there are some important angles to keep in mind.
First, the Republicans’ politics of personal grievance is based solely on their hurt feelings. They’re not saying the president lied or that his numbers don’t add up, but rather, they’re outraged that Obama was a big meanie. That’s kind of pathetic, and it reinforces fears that the House GOP majority is dominated by right-wing lawmakers with temperament of children.
Second, exactly what kind of reaction did Republicans seriously expect? Their fraudulent and callous budget plan, approved yesterday despite bipartisan opposition, eliminates Medicare. It punishes the elderly, the disabled, and low-income families, and rewards millionaires and billionaires. It calls for devastating cuts that would do widespread damage to the middle class and the economy. Were Republicans seriously waiting for Obama to politely pat them on the head and say, “It’s OK, you tried your best. I’ll give you an A for effort”?
Third, why is it Republicans expect one-sided graciousness? They expected a “peace offering” after pushing their own plan that was “deliberately constructed to be as offensive to Democrats as it’s possible to be,” and didn’t even bother with insincere “nods in the direction of bipartisanship.” I’ll never understand why Obama is expected to be conciliatory with those who refuse to do the same.
And finally, having a debate pitting two competing visions isn’t a bad development. Greg Sargent’s take on this rings true.
Throughout the first two years of Obama’s presidency, leading Republicans have regularly claimed that Obama is taking America towards socialism. Yet when a Democratic president stands up and aggressively defends his vision and worldview, and contrasts it sharply with that of his foes, something’s wrong. That’s not supposed to happen.
Obama’s characterization of the GOP vision was harsh. But so what? Politics is supposed to be an impassioned argument over what we all think the country should be. Is it possible to cross lines? Sure, but Obama didn’t cross any lines — in fairness, neither has Ryan — and no one was blindsided. No one was the victim of any sneak attack. We should want politicians who think their opponents’ worldviews are deeply wrongheaded to be free to say so in very vivid terms. Otherwise, what’s the point of it all?
I’d add just one last point. For two years, Obama pleaded with Republicans to play a constructive role, work in good faith, and compromise. They refused. Lucy doesn’t get to complain when Charlie Brown doesn’t want to run at a football that’s going to be pulled away anyway.
By: Steve Benen, Washington Monthly, Political Animal, April 16, 2011
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