By now most people have heard some of the worst things about the Republican budget proposal -- commonly called the "Ryan plan" and unironically described by the GOP as "the Path to Prosperity": That it decimates programs for middle class and lower-income Americans while giving even greater tax breaks to the rich -- $3 trillion worth, in fact. That it guts education, research, and transportation while preserving tax breaks for Big Oil. That it undercuts Medicare with a voucher system that will be worth less and less with each passing year.
And that, despite all that, it would actually increase the deficit.
You'd think that pretty much covers it -- but it doesn't. When it comes to Medicare, there are three more ugly facts about this plan that have yet to attract widespread attention -- mostly because the Republicans have done their best to keep them secret:
1. They're secretly planning to raise the Medicare age.
It's not in House Budget Chair Paul Ryan's Wall Street Journal editorial, the one where he sneered at "some who would distort for political gain our efforts to preserve programs like Medicare" and said "our plan provides guaranteed coverage options financed by a premium-support payment." It's not in the summary description of the GOP budget, which claims it "strengthens health and retirement security by taking power away from government bureaucrats and empowering patients instead with control over their own care." It's not even in the full budget document itself, which is 99 pages long and contains a section entitled "Strengthening Health and Retirement Security."
So how do we know that the GOP wants to raise the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67? Because that's what Ryan and his staff told the Congressional Budget Office when they asked the CBO to calculate the impact of their plan. It's right there in the CBO report on the budget.
Here's the key sentence: "In addition, the eligibility age for Medicare would increase by two months per year beginning in 2023 until reaching age 67 in 2034."
That's right: When Ryan and his staff instructed the CBO to calculate the impact of the Republican budget, they told its analysts that the GOP plan included an increase in the eligibility age for Medicare. Apparently they didn't have room to mention that fact anywhere in their 99-page document, and didn't see fit to bring it up while they were spouting all that rhetoric about "preserving entitlement programs for the future."
The Republican Party intends to raise the Medicare age for people as they approach the costliest years for receiving health insurance, and they're keeping it a secret from the public. This change alone would indirectly cut Social Security benefits by as much as 45 percent, by forcing seniors to spend that much of their benefit check on additional health care costs.
And remember, the GOP wants to raise the eligibility age for Social Security, too. The net effect of these two changes means that older Americans would be forced to keep working -- or looking for work -- at an age when their medical expenses would make hiring them prohibitively expensive for employers who offer health insurance. They would be forced to try purchasing health insurance on the open market.
Which gets us to our second dirty secret ...
2. Insurers will get to set their own rates.
The Ryan plan lets private, for-profit health insurers set their own rates -- rates which, according to the Ryan plan, will determine the Federal budget for senior health. It doesn't say that, of course, but that's how it would work.
According the the GOP's proposal, "All plans... would participate in an annual competitive bidding process ...The second least expensive approved plan... would establish the benchmark that determines the premium support amount... Program growth would be determined by the competitive bidding process..."
What does that mean in English? That Medicare goes away, to be replaced by a system of private health insurance companies who'll be paid to provide services that are supposed to (but won't) resemble the level of coverage seniors currently receive under Medicare. That health insurers would submit their bids to provide those services once a year.
And then comes the surprising part: The Federal government's expenditures for senior health care will be determined by the private insurers themselves, because the second-lowest bid establishes what the government is willing to pay for health insurance.
How crazy is that? Private health insurance rates have been climbing at three and four times the rate of today's Medicare. They've shown no ability to restrain costs -- and have no motive to do so, since they make money the old fashioned way: on the mark-up. And now they -- or the lowest bidder among them -- will dictate what the government must pay.
The plan says so, very clearly. "As opposed to pegging the growth rate to a predetermined formula," the GOP document say, "competitive bidding offers the ideal means of harnessing the power of choice and competition to control costs, while also securing guaranteed affordability for patients." In other words, the Republican Ryan plan places budgetary control for a major government program in the hands of the very insurance companies that profit from it.
At least that's what it would do, if they didn't contradict themselves in the very next paragraph.
3. The GOP plan radically cuts per-person spending for Medicare.
Remember that sentence we just quoted, the one about not pegging the growth rate to a predetermined formula? They totally lied about that. The plan does peg the growth rate to a predetermined formula, and Ryan's staff were very specific about it in their instructions to the CBO: "Total spending would grow in subsequent years," the CBO was told, "with nominal growth in per capita GDP plus 0.5 percentage points per year."
That's a "predetermined formula." And it's important to note that "nominal growth in per capita GDP" is not the same as the the growth in per capita health care costs, which have risen much more quickly than general inflation or GDP. That amounts to a major cut in benefits every year.
It gets even worse. The "per capita GDP" applies to everybody in the nation, not the ever-swelling ranks of Medicare-eligible seniors. This gets technical, but here's what it means: After this formula takes effect in 2023, there will be much faster growth in the Medicare-eligible age group than in the overall population. By structuring their formula this way the Republicans have ensured that there will be dramatic benefit cuts, especially as the "age wave" of Baby Boomers retires in the 2023-2030 period.
The "predetermined formula" is itself a secret, since they said there wasn't one. And the way it's structured will lead to dramatic cuts in Medicare.
Three-Pronged Attack
While the contradictions and evasions make exact forecasts difficult, it's clear that the net effect of these three changes would be to create a budget-busting giveaway to rich insurance corporations while at the same time slashing health coverage for seniors. And this isn't some radical ideologue's manifesto: it's the Republican Party's official Medicare proposal.
One terrible plan, three dreadful secrets. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has said very, very nice things about this budget. In fact, all of the GOP's leaders have been bragging about it. Since they're so proud of it, why don't they tell more people what it really does?
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Enact tax cuts and corporate subsides in the name of stimulating the economy and turn over the money that people pay in taxes to the wealthy instead of entitlements. hey have been using this charade for the last 30 years and all I have seen happen to our country is income disparity, revenue declines, bailouts for banks, trillions in lost wealth, attacks on the middle class and poor, and the bankruptcy of our treasury in the name of the market. The Ryan plan is to undo the Safety Net and Ryan calling the net a hammock is intended to get people off their as_ses and into their graves for all the hard work they have done for the 1%.
Single payer takes much of that criminal relationship out of the mix.
Also, why is his plan considered to be bold? It's a cowardly plan that caters to people over 55 while screwing over people under 55 by making them pay for something(subsidizing Medicare for people over 55) they aren't going to get.
Talk about divisive politics!
any help to the seniors WORKING middle class or the very low income brackets
2. Like every other market, health insurance has both supply and demand, not just supply. In a premium support model, insurers will adjust their coverage and premiums to the ability of retirees to pay under Medicare and retirees get to choose among multiple insurance plans. Under Obamacare, the IPAB board will determine what coverage you are permitted and you have no alternatives.
3. There are no cuts in Medicare spending under the Ryan plan. Rather, spending simply increases at a slower rate based upon the growth of the economy and the tax revenues necessary to pay for it. The alternative of borrowing $1.3 trillion per year is national insolvency in about five years.
The truly terrifying alternatives are proceeding under the current course.
Among the savings that Ryan did not list is a massive reduction in Medicare fraud moving to private insurers who effectively root out fraudulent claims.
The GOP plan does not save the government money because Medicare is supposed to be self funding. The problem is that Medicare is already spending more than it receives in taxes because of Mr. Obama's hogtied economy and this shortfall will only get progressively worse.
Medicare as it is presently structured is undeniably unworkable. Mr. Obama's solution is to keep you on Medicare and have his unaccountable IPAB board cut coverage.
Under the Ryan plan, you have a choice of insurance plans including Medicare from which to choose.
I would much rather have the Ryan options when I retire.
Fast forward to 2011. The average lifespan in America is now 78 years, and you wonder both Social Security and Medicare are going broke? We are funding 13 year golf vacations for the active middle-aged instead of a safety net for the aged and infirm.
"As Table 1 shows, the majority of Americans who made it to adulthood could expect to live to 65, and those who did live to 65 could look forward to collecting benefits for many years into the future. So we can observe that for men, for example, almost 54% of the them could expect to live to age 65 if they survived to age 21, and men who attained age 65 could expect to collect Social Security benefits for almost 13 years (and the numbers are even higher for women).
Also, it should be noted that there were already 7.8 million Americans age 65 or older in 1935 (cf. Table 2), so there was a large and growing population of people who could receive Social Security. Indeed, the actuarial estimates used by the Committee on Economic Security (CES) in designing the Social Security program projected that there would be 8.3 million Americans age 65 or older by 1940 (when monthly benefits started). So Social Security was not designed in such a way that few people would collect the benefits."
http://www.ssa.gov/history/lifeexpect.html
I am trying to figure out who the voters are who support the Republican efforts to enrich the rich 1% at the expense of the 99% non-rich. Of course the rich support it, but who else is supporting this exploitation? I think there are a lot of gullible people who believe whatever story Fox wants to tell, and there are evangelicals who think God will provide for them if they can just force their religious ignorance upon everyone else, but who else?
Who in the 99% is so willing to vote against their own best economic interest to impose this destruction?
Are there masses of government workers, or retired ones, who imagine they have secure benefits and don't want to be taxed for others to have them? Are there racists and bigots so driven by hate that they care less about their own economic security, and so they vote with the party that is willing to legislate racism and bigotry? Are they people who are too undereducated or uninformed or too deluded by Fox to understand what is being perpetrated by the Republicans onto the American public?
Life in the US for anyone not rich is being degraded by the right wing and their compliant deluded voters. It is a greed driven class war, enabled by widespread ignorance on the part of Republican voters. Is there any hope of fixing this?
Pretty much what caused this economic nightmare to begin with
That and tax cuts to the wealthy