The corporate media has been repackaging and regurgitating the Republican party's latest batch of privitization proposals as "reform." Indeed, CNN breathlessly call Paul Ryan popular for proposing to turn Medicare into a voucher program. Sadly, the mainstream media refuses to call out Republicans for proposing to completely destroy the social safety net. While Democrats get slammed for even considering minor cost saving measures that continue to preserve Medicare and Social Security as government funded and run programs, Republicans are cheered for pushing to destroy these programs down to the roots.
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2011/09/27/329809/paul-ryans-replacement-for-affordable-care-act-health-vouchers-for-everyone/
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WY) is finally offering a Republican replacement for the Affordable Care Act. But don’t expect any new ideas — the chairman of the powerful House Budget Committee has dusted off his “Roadmap For America’s Future” proposal and is now officially offering it up a viable alternative to the ACA. The plan doubles down on Ryan’s effort to end the traditional Medicare program for future retirees and block grants Medicaid to the states, but then goes even further, re-stating Ryan’s long-term goal of ending the existing employer-based health care system and pushing individuals and families into the unregulated individual health insurance market with a voucher in hand.
With the Affordable Care Act fully repealed, Ryan would eliminate the existing subsidy for employer-sponsored insurance and use those dollars to provide families and individuals with tax credits to purchase coverage on their own. Those denied insurance because of a pre-existing conditions can enroll in a state-based high risk pools full of sick people. Americans currently under 55 years of age will move into a private plan outside of the Medicare system and states will receive less federal funds for their Medicaid program through a “block” of dollars that does not keep up with costs.
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1) Ryan’s “premium support” proposal for Medicare wouldn’t do anything to actually lower the nation’s health care spending. Rather, it reduces government expenditures by asking future enrollees to pay more for their health care coverage. Future seniors would be taken out of the traditional Medicare program and given a “premium support” to purchase more expensive private coverage. As the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) concluded in its analysis of the Ryan proposal, “a typical beneficiary would spend more for health care… private plans would cost more than traditional Medicare.” ”This would more than double out-of-pocket health-care spending by a typical senior to $12,500 per year.”
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The major problem here is Ryan’s ideology and underlining philosophy. It’s what economist Jacob Hacker calls The Great Risk Shift. Republicans are slowly dismantling the New-Deal era institutions that spread economic risks “across rich, and poor, healthy and sick, able-bodied and disabled, young and old” and shifting all of the economic costs and risks onto individuals (or as Ryan calls it, freeing Americans from the “relentless expansion of government and a new culture of dependence“).
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