TP Republicans sentence seniors to death

“Ryan plan a good deal? Depends partly on your age

House Budget Committee chairman offers plan to transform Medicare

 

By Tom CurryNational affairs writer

msnbc.com

updated 4/5/2011 11:46:25 AM ET

 

Over age 54? You needn’t worry about the proposal House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., unveiled Tuesday for a redesign of Medicare.

 

Under age 54? You’ll need to pay a bigger share of the cost of your medical care once you’re retired.

 

Ryan’s remake of Medicare would save as much as $285 billion a year by 2030, and would mean less federal spending on medical care in future decades for today’s workers and their children.

 

Ryan’s Medicare redesign is at the heart of a long-term budget plan he released Tuesday. He said the plan would cut $6.2 trillion in spending from President Barack Obama’s proposed spending plans over the next 10 years. That works out to about a 13 percent reduction over the ten-year period.

 

Under Obama’s blueprint, federal outlays would be nearly 23 percent of gross domestic product over the next ten years; Ryan says his plan would keep federal outlays under 20 percent of GDP. But the bigger savings would come after that initial ten-year period.

The Medicare redesign Ryan is proposing resembles one he offered with Alice Rivlin, a Democrat, an Obama supporter, and former budget director in the Clinton administration.

Replacing open-ended Medicare payments 
The plan would replace the current open-ended system of Medicare payments with one in which the federal government would subsidize people to purchase insurance. In health insurance jargon, this is called “premium support.”

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Ryan would set up a system called “the Medicare exchange” in which beneficiaries would choose an insurance plan they preferred.

His summary of the Medicare proposal said, “Health plans that choose to participate in the Medicare exchange must agree to offer insurance to all Medicare beneficiaries, to avoid cherry-picking and ensure that Medicare’s sickest and highest-cost beneficiaries receive coverage.”

Under his plan, poorer and sicker people in Medicare in future decades would be more heavily subsidized by the taxpayers than would wealthier and healthier retirees.

The premium support payments would grow annually at the GDP growth rate, plus one percent. This would mean that Medicare spending would grow much more slowly than under the current system.

Ryan would apply his plan only to those who turn age 65 in 2022.

Here are the important themes to keep in mind when assessing Ryan’s plan:

·         Laying down a marker 
Ryan will include his Medicare proposals in the budget resolution for fiscal year 2012, which begins in October.

But no budget resolution that incorporates these ideas is going to be adopted; the Democratic-controlled Senate would not agree to it.

So the Ryan proposals are significant mostly for setting down a marker of what Republicans would do if they had the power to do it.

These ideas would be enacted only in the ideal scenario for Republicans: they keep control of the House of Representatives in 2012, gain control of the Senate and the Republican candidate wins the presidency. Then in 2013 these proposals are enacted.

Of course, events may not unfold in that way.

And as Ryan acknowledged Tuesday at his press conference at the Capitol, calling for a fundamental redesign of Medicare exposes him and his party to Democratic charges they are bent on destroying Medicare and are indifferent to the suffering of old people.

“Look at these new people who just got here,” he said, referring to several freshmen Republican House members standing at his side. “They didn’t come here for a career; they came here for a cause. This is not a budget, this is a cause…. We cannot keep going down the path of fearing what the other political party would do to us if we try to solve a problem”

But given the danger of damaging Democratic ads in 2012, why is Ryan proceeding?

One reason is he has already committed himself to fundamental Medicare reform over his years in Congress, carving out his identity as a numbers cruncher and fiscal hawk.

And he has support from House Speaker John Boehner who said last week, “For 20 years, I've watched leaders around here look up at the size of the problem of growing entitlement spending. It's like looking up at the mountain; they see how steep it is” and decide to put off action for another day, or another decade.

But, he said, “We are imprisoning the future for our kids and our grandkids if we do not act, and it's time to act.””