Cutting Through The Medicare Charade
In his Wall Street Journal op-ed today, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said the Republican budget plan is focused on “saving Medicare.”
Of course, in this context, this is intended to strip the word “save” of all meaning. Even the Wall Street Journal yesterday noted that the GOP proposal “would essentially end Medicare,” which happens to be true.
Medicare is very easy to understand — it’s a popular system of socialized, single-payer health care for seniors. Beneficiaries love it, and the system works pretty well. The House Republican scheme for Medicare is a little more complicated, but still pretty straightforward — the GOP intends to privatize it. The resulting system would, ironically, look quite a bit like the Affordable Care Act, with seniors entering exchanges, where they would take a subsidy to purchase private insurance.
So, what’s the problem? Republicans intend to rig the game, scrapping the existing system and ending the guarantee of set benefits, while at the same giving beneficiaries a voucher that wouldn’t keep up with costs.
This isn’t “saving Medicare”; it’s ending Medicare and screwing over seniors.
Josh Marshall had a good piece on this yesterday, calling the plan “Medicare Phase-out legislation.”
The Ryan plan is to get rid of Medicare and in place of it give seniors a voucher to buy health care insurance from private insurers. Now, what if you can’t buy as much as insurance or as much care as you need? Well, start saving now or just too bad.
Now, by any reasonable standard, that’s getting rid of Medicare. Abolishing Medicare. Phasing it out. Whatever you want to call it. Medicare is this single payer program that guarantees seniors health care, as noted above. Ryan’s plan pushes seniors into the private markets and give them a voucher. That’s called getting rid of the program. There’s simply no ifs or caveats about. That’s not cuts or slowing of the growth. That’s abolishing the whole program. Saying anything else is a lie.
Yep.
I’d just add that some folks may have forgotten why Medicare was created in the first place. The nature of the human body is that ailments are more common as we get older, and profit-seeking insurance companies weren’t keen on covering those who cost so much more to cover. On average, folks who’ve lived more than six decades often have pre-existing conditions, and we know all too well what insurers think of those with pre-existing conditions.
Seniors relied on this system for many years, but it didn’t work. We created Medicare because relying on private insurers didn’t work.
And now Republicans want to roll back the clock.
By: Steve Benen, Washington Monthly, Political Animal, April 5, 2011
Vital Center: Why are Democrats Fighting for a Republican Health Plan?
Here is the ultimate paradox of the Great Health Care Showdown: Congress will divide along partisan lines to pass a Republican version of health-care reform, and Republicans will vote against it. Yes, Democrats have rallied behind a bill that large numbers of Republicans should love. It is built on a series of principles that Republicans espoused for years.
Republicans have said that they do not want to destroy the private insurance market. This bill not only preserves that market but strengthens it by bringing millions of new customers. The plan before Congress does not call for a government “takeover” of health care. It provides subsidies so more people can buy private insurance.
Republicans always say that they are against “socialized medicine.” Not only is this bill nothing like a “single-payer” health system along Canadian or British lines, but it doesn’t even include the “public option” that would have allowed people voluntarily to buy their insurance from the government. The single-payer idea fell by the wayside long ago, and supporters of the public option—sadly, from my point of view—lost out in December.
They’ll be back, of course. The newly pragmatic Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) was right to say that this is just the first step in a long process. We will see if this market-based system works. If it doesn’t, single-payer plans and public options will look more attractive.
Republican reform advocates have long called for a better insurance market. Our current system provides individuals with little market power in the purchase of health insurance. As a result, they typically pay exorbitant premiums. The new insurance exchanges will pool individuals together and give them a fighting chance at a fair shake.
Republicans now say that they hate the mandate that requires everyone to buy insurance. But an individual mandate was hailed as a form of “personal responsibility” by no less a conservative Republican than Mitt Romney. He was proud of the mandate and proud of the insurance exchange idea, known in Massachusetts as “The Health Connector” (the idea itself came from the conservative Heritage Foundation).
What does it tell us that Republicans are now opposing a bill rooted in so many of their own principles? Why has it fallen to Democrats to push the thing through? The obvious lesson is that the balance of opinion in the Republican Party has swung far to the right of where it used to be. Republicans once believed in market-based government solutions. Now they are suspicious of government solutions altogether. That’s true even in an area such as health care, where government, through Medicare and Medicaid, already plays a necessarily large role.
As for the Democrats, they have been both pragmatic and moderate, despite all the claims that this plan is “left wing” or “socialist.” It is neither. You could argue that Democrats have learned from Republicans. Some might say that Democrats have been less than true to their principles.
But there is a simpler conclusion: Democrats, including President Obama, are so anxious to get everyone health insurance that they are more than willing to try a market-based system and hope it works. It’s a shame the Republicans can no longer take “yes” for an answer.
By: E.J. Dionne, Jr. -author of the recently published Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right. He is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University. March 20, 2010, The New Republic
When Conservatives Play Make-Believe: Jonathan Cohn
Paul Waldman, today, writing at the American Prospect: The only problem is that there is no tyranny to rebel against. President Barack Obama isn’t rounding up his opponents. He isn’t punishing them for their free speech. He hasn’t even raised anyone’s taxes, save for a boost in the federal cigarette tax (we await the event where the tea partiers dump cartons of Marlboros into the Chesapeake). So what are the outrageous crimes that have driven the right to shout “Enough!” until their faces turn red? In the face of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, Obama passed a large stimulus bill. And he might pass health-care reform that could extend coverage to those who don’t have it, all while preserving the private insurance system. He’s also embraced a market-based initiative for reducing greenhouse emissions. Not exactly a program that would that would offend the delegates of the Continental Congress. What has driven conservatives to distraction isn’t tyranny — it’s the oldest political complaint in the book: The other guys won and are attempting to implement their agenda.
Yet when conservatives criticize the administration, today’s playacting revolutionaries imagine themselves heroes of liberty, bravely staring down the forces of oppression. This notion must be called what it is: a puerile fantasy. The tea-party sign-waver is not the man standing in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square. The conservative blogger is not Jacobo Timerman, exposing the barbarity of the Argentine junta only to experience it himself. The activists and operatives and think-tank denizens are not Vaclav Havel, or Ken Saro-Wiwa, or Nelson Mandela.
And they sure aren’t Washington, James Madison, or Thomas Jefferson. Precisely because they live in the country those American visionaries made, the Founding Father fetishists risk nothing by objecting to the current administration, no matter the apocalyptic language they use to clothe those objections in glory. They are participants in public debate in the world’s oldest democracy–nothing more, nothing less. It’s a fine thing to be, but it doesn’t make you a hero. And putting on a tricornered hat won’t make it so.
Jonathan Cohn-Senior Editor: The Treatment-The New Republic- February 23, 2010
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