The White House, “news” media and progressive blogosphere have
many faults — mendacity and collusion, to name the most obvious —
but they cannot be accused of being unpredictable. Thus, when Mitt
Romney announced that Paul Ryan would be his running mate on the
GOP presidential ticket, it was hardly necessary to consult one’s
Vedic astrologer to know that the Wisconsin congressman would again
be denounced for his dark desire to deprive Granny of health care.
And, sure enough, even as Ryan was introduced by Romney as his
choice for VP in a series of Saturday appearances, he was being
depicted as Ryan, Destroyer of Medicare.
The first and most irresponsible attacks came from
bought-and-paid-for purveyors of White House talking points like
the stooges at Media Matters, whose super PAC released a 290-page
slander manual
that claims Ryan would “essentially end Medicare.” Likewise, Think
Progress opened fire before lunch with a tweet
declaring, “If you hate Medicare, you’ll love Romney’s pick for
VP.” Then, the “legitimate” outlets began to parrot the Obama
campaign’s message of the day. ABC News, for example, ran a piece
early Saturday afternoon
advising that “Critics have called Ryan’s 2011 proposal the
‘end of Medicare as we know it,’ and that’s true.”
The obvious purpose of these tweets, posts and “news” stories is
to scare seniors into voting against Romney and Ryan in November.
Ironically, it is Obama’s misbegotten health care law, the Patient
Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), that should
terrify seniors. As Avik Roy
points out, “According to the latest estimates from the
Congressional Budget Office, ObamaCare will reduce Medicare
spending by approximately $743 billion between 2013 and 2022,
relative to prior law.” Unlike Ryan’s Medicare plan, which even ABC
admits won’t affect anyone over age 55, PPACA’s cuts will hit
current Medicare beneficiaries.
It should further terrify seniors that Obama has offered no
serious plan for reforming Medicare, which is on a fiscal
trajectory that actually will destroy the program if
something isn’t done soon. As Ryan himself
told the President in February of 2010 during the charade
billed by the White House as a bipartisan Health Care Summit,
“Medicare right now has a $38 trillion dollar unfunded liability,
that’s $38 trillion in empty promises to my parent’s generation,
our generation, and our kid’s generation.” Yet the Obama
administration has all but ignored the looming Medicare disaster,
essentially pretending that the status quo is somehow
sustainable.
In fact, when last April’s report from the program’s trustees
predicted that the whole house of cards would begin to collapse in
2024, Obama’s delusional Secretary of Health and Human Services
said, “Medicare is in a much stronger position than it was a
few years ago, thanks to the Affordable Care Act.” This assertion
by Commissar Sebelius is preposterous, of course. As former
director of the Congressional Budget Office Douglas Holtz-Eakin
wrote at the time, “Medicare’s cash position makes Enron’s
business model look downright reputable. The reality is Medicare is
bleeding cash, a fact disguised by creative accounting.”
All of which suggests that ending Medicare “as we know it” is a
pretty good idea. How then, would Paul Ryan go about cleaning it
up? The first step, as he has often said, is to repeal Obamacare.
Contrary to Sebelius’s Orwellian claims, PPACA exacerbates
Medicare’s multiple ills. He would also utilize some of the
market-based features of a program that has often been denounced by
conservatives. As he put it in a June interview,
“Our reforms draw upon the lessons of Medicare’s prescription drug
program (Medicare Part D), in which patients have the freedom to
choose among competing Medicare-approved coverage options.”
More specifically, as outlined in a pamphlet
released when Ryan partnered with Democrat Ron Wyden to create the
latest, bipartisan version of his plan, “Starting in 2022, a new
Medicare program will begin offering seniors a choice among
Medicare-approved private plans and the traditional Medicare plan.…
Coverage will be guaranteed through a new ‘premium support’ system
that encourages plans to provide high-quality care more
efficiently.” The plan will “encourage” efficiency by forcing
traditional Medicare to compete with private plans for patients,
and this competition will drive down costs just as it did with Part
D.
The plan also “guarantees” that costs will be kept under
control: “In the event that these efforts do not stem the rising
tide of Medicare spending, beginning in 2023 there will be a cap on
cost growth of 1 percent over Gross Domestic Product, plus
inflation.” The plan would also expand means-testing beyond that
which already exists for Part B and Part D to the new premium
support payments. The basic idea of Ryan-Wyden, then, is to allow
the market to work as much as possible without disrupting the
coverage of current beneficiaries or damaging the safety net. In
other words, the notion that Ryan would destroy Medicare is
absurd.
If the Romney campaign succeeds in defeating Obama, the plan
will evolve further pursuant to the political conditions that
prevail after January 2013. The new President will probably want a
few changes, though he has already praised Ryan-Wyden. And Congress
isn’t simply going to rubber stamp what comes out of the White
House, even if the Republicans retain their majority in the House
and gain control of the Senate. So, if the new VP suddenly drops
his clever disguise as a Wisconsin policy wonk and reveals himself
as Ryan, Destroyer of Medicare, Romney will just send him to the
funeral of some foreign head of state.
