House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan put out a budget proposal last week that will leave the vast majority of future retirees without decent health care by ending Medicare as we know it. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis, most middle-income retirees would have to pay almost half of their income to purchase a Medicare equivalent insurance package by 2030. They would be paying much more than half of their income in later years.
This sort of broadside against the living standards of the middle class might have been expected to draw an outraged response in a nation that exalts the lifestyle and values of the middle class. Instead the punditry rallied around Mr. Ryan's plan to deal with the problem of run-away entitlement spending, crediting it for being "serious" even if they did not embrace all the details.
If there is any doubt that our political system is controlled by an elite who is completely removed from the bulk of the population, this response to the Ryan plan ended it. There is nothing at all serious about the Ryan plan. It is naked attempt to redistribute yet more money to the country's rich at the expense of everyone else.
The proposal to end Medicare relies on market efficiencies to get health care costs under control, as though we had not tried this before. Has Representative Ryan never heard of Medicare Advantage or Medicare Plus Choice? Doesn't he know that we already have the opportunity to see the effectiveness of private insurers in containing health care costs in the vast non-Medicare insurance market?
Based on this extensive experience, we know that the private insurance market does not control costs. This is why CBO calculated that Ryan's plan would hugely raise the cost of health care for seniors. If every senior got a Medicare equivalent policy under Representative Ryan's plan (which most will not be able to afford), the added cost of his system would be more than $20 trillion over the next 75 years.
This comes to more than $60,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. That would be money out of the pocket of ordinary workers and retirees that will go to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, highly paid medical specialists and other health care providers.
When it comes to redistributing money upward, the bar for intellectual coherence is set very low. Pundits from across the political spectrum had a hard time containing their enthusiasm for Ryan's plan even if few were willing to embrace it in its entirety. And, if there was not enough substance over which to get excited, then there were always the 37 footnotes which Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer trumpeted last week.
In principle the country's elite should be laying low right now. After all, their greed and ineptitude has given us the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. But after getting the Wall Street banks back on their feet with trillions of dollars of government subsidized loans, the elite are once again making a full-frontal assault on the living standards of the middle-class. Last week it was Medicare, but they promise to be back to attack Social Security in the not-too distant future.
The ostensible rationale for this attack is the country's huge budget deficit. This is garbage. As all the pundits know, the country has a huge deficit today because the Wall Street boys drove the economy off a cliff. If the government deficit was not propping up the economy we would be looking at 11 or 12 percent unemployment, rather than 8.8 percent. Spending creates jobs and at this point it is not coming from private sector, so the government must fill the hole.
Over the longer term the projections of huge deficits are driven by the projected explosion in health care costs. President Obama's health care reform took steps toward constraining these costs, although probably not enough. Remarkably, Ryan's plan abandons these cost-control measures, virtually guaranteeing that quality health care becomes unaffordable for all but a small elite.
And the pundits call Ryan's plan "serious." Yes, it is very serious. It is a serious plan for taking tens of trillions of dollars from low-income and middle-income people and giving them away as tax breaks to the rich and to the health care industry. It is about as serious as a robber with a gun pointed at your head.
"Enough...is never enough." Ferengi Rules Of Acquisition #97
The Ryan plan is a farce. It should be thrown out completely. Unfortunately I haven't got enough faith that Obama will not "compromise" with Ryan.
God help us if they get control in 2012.
So the only perfect Egoism Ticket 2012 is Trump/Palin or Palin/Trump. Pick one.
How right he is, the 98% of our citizens who make a pittance and who he wants to tax EVEN MORE, are the MAKERS. Then there are the 2% who own most everything while at the same time complain to their puppets (people like Ryan and the TEA party) that they are paying too much. They are the TAKERS.
Nothing like collecting that socialist welfare money, eh Ryan or should I say Sir Hypocrite Ryan?
I also remember how 401K's and IRA's were created to reduce Corporate pension expenses. Allowing employees to save for their own retirements, along with match amounts at tax savings rates by their employer, the employer could faze out their retirement plans.
Of course, they never publicized the real reasons back then, did they?
So now Wall Street put many of us 'saver's' in the poor house and the safety net, Social Security is on the chopping block.
So now the Health Insurance/Medical Providers have turned caring for our bodies into an industry, jacking up the prices so only the rich can afford them and the safety net Medicare is now on the chopping block.
Is the GOP gonna keep kissing the a$$es of the rich in the name of economic/job growth and keep stealing from the 'consumer class' who helped make them become rich to the point of excess?
What's wrong with this picture? Corporate can't even provide us with jobs to get either of them! They are all gambling on Wall Street.
2. End corporate corruption.
3. Close tax loopholes.
There. I just solved your budget problem.
(NOTE: I've listed these as three separate items, but now that I look at it, it seems items 1, 2, and 3 are really the same thing.)
5. Raise taxes on the rich.
6. Shut down the CIA.
There are sooo many things you can cut, that don't HURT ordinary Americans!
However, Americans are demanding more and more out of this program, and aren't willing to pay the extra costs. Politicians have played on the myth that we can get all the health care we want, and they can make it LESS costly - all to get your vote.
The simple fact is that Medicare and SS (and most all other entitlements) simply cannot continue in their present states, as massive increases in taxes are going to be required to continue to fund them. And, the average American isn't going to stand for significant tax increases.
But people of a certain political persuasion react instinctively and negatively to any suggestion that things have to be done differently because, they say, it's "messing with" American's health care. Well, what's going to happen when (not if) the Medicare well essentially runs dry, and that's all seniors had to rely on?
Thank goodness some people are thinking ahead on this issue. Thank you, Mr. Ryan, for your courage in suggesting alternatives. Your ideas may not be the most popular, but bringing this issue to light as you are doing may help start converations that will result in catastrope being avoided (it is all but certain as it stands now).
It deserves whatever it gets in that case. And I refuse to raise a family in such a pit as they will create here. Simple as that.
The Republican Party since Reagan has done nothing but throw one roadblock in my way after another.
Removing income averaging to pay for Reagan's taxcuts for the rich the very year I graduated... constantly raising the social security income ceiling every time I got a raise so they could raid social security to pay for tax cuts for billionaires. Using my tax dollars to send industry overseas. Raising every regressive tax known. Busting unions, dissolving retirement plans. Never ends.
Well, it does end NOW. If they, after stealing my money for medicare for 25 years now dismantle this program (which is most clearly the intent) and they do this without giving myself and all other donors the PRESENT VALUE of what we've ALL paid into, I will not pay another penny into the program starting the moment they enact it. If that means voting with my feet so be it. We'll see how many of these teaparty trolls will still have their state government jobs with the taxdollars of people like me when we're gone. It will be a pleasure to watch them have to figure out what it costs to pay the health care costs for their parents in an unregulated monopolized private insurer market.
You just picked up your first fan
Dave/
Yes, indeed, knowthem, #2 fan.
>>>"its because we have large numbers of immoral and corrupt folks who DONT GIVE A DAMN about fiscal responsibility --- so long as they get their monthly dole from the govt. teat."
Wow. How desperately ignorant. Please be more specific. Exactly what form does this "monthly dole" come in? Surely you aren't talking about Social Security, since retirees have paid into that all their lives. That program pays for itself. So what the heck are you talking about?
The horrible fin. mess we are in IS NOT because some rich bankers screwed the common man -- its because we have large numbers of immoral and corrupt folks who DONT GIVE A DAMN about fiscal responsibility --- so long as they get their monthly dole from the govt. teat. PERIOD !! In addition we have unprincipled legislators in D.C. who dont GIVE A DAMN about the common man, nor the rich man --- except as it may cushion their bank account and massage their grossly inflated egos ( think Pelosi & Reid ), ---- career politicians engaged in deception and raising obscene amounts of money for re-election . Thats the error of America !
Any one who does'nt recognize the need for term limits -- is not a clear thinker.
You know that the Nation's productive states (almost every one of them blue& Dem) have to fork over hundreds of billions every year to the non-productive states (all of them red and Repub) through the federal revenue sharing program. How about we make all states live within their means and forgo that massive transfer of wealth that the GOP relies upon to maintain power in the red states?
Myself and scores of millions of workers have PAID into these programs as my parents did. There's no "entitlement" about it.
Freeloading and entitlement is taxing ME to death while insisting it would be "socialism" to tax the Republican fat cat donors who spend my tax money like drunken sailors on Bridges to Nowhere in states that have no productivity, industry or anything to offer besides (sometimes) a nice view. Like, you know, the red states.
You don't need a death panel--it's plain and simple. No medical care, you die. And if you were lame enough to not earn more than $250,000 or whatever the going rate is for upper middle class--that would be teachers, firefighters, insurance adjusters, many lawyers, college professors, truck drivers, some doctors, clergymen and women, most journalists, grocery store clerks, Starbucks baristas...--in other words, if you were 98% of the country, I guess you deserve to be bereft of affordable care. You just weren't smart enough to earn enough to lift you out of the middle class.
See, they've eliminated the bureaucracy part of the Obama plan. I hope that 2% is going to pay a lot to the charities that will be required to help care for all these people.