Grasping the Medicare Distortion

Spread the love

Loading

Yuval Levin @ NRO:

It is simply a fact that the United States government is now on track for an unprecedented fiscal disaster — with debt quickly surpassing the size of our GDP and reaching twice that size in the coming decades, crushing any chance for robust growth. It is also a fact that the rising cost of Medicare is at the very heart of that disaster. The program has been growing far faster than the rest of the federal budget for decades, and the trend is only set to accelerate.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, Medicare spending as a share of the economy is five times what it was in 1970, while all other federal spending combined (excluding interest) is 1.1 times what it was. By 2035, CBO expects Medicare costs to be nearly twice what they are today as a share of the economy, while all other federal spending combined will actually decline somewhat as a share of the economy. The debt problem is a Medicare problem. There is no way to avert fiscal disaster without significantly reining in the growth of that program. Even President Obama has acknowledged that no other solution, and certainly not his symbolic class-warfare tax proposals, could be sufficient, saying last July that “if you look at the numbers, then Medicare in particular will run out of money and we will not be able to sustain that program no matter how much taxes go up.”

And yet, even though he acknowledges this fact, the president has chosen to do nothing, and indeed to stand firmly in the way of doing anything meaningful to solve the problem. Obamacare’s Medicare cuts and its board of price controllers aren’t a solution — the CBO debt and Medicare growth numbers cited above already include them, and the agency (along with Medicare’s actuary, who works for the president) has said they are very unlikely to work. What is needed is a structural reform of the program, to enable it to deliver coverage to seniors far more efficiently by driving more efficient delivery of care. But seniors who are now in the program don’t want to hear that it’s going bankrupt, and don’t want to think about changes to it, so the politics of Medicare argue strongly against any kind of solution. The president and his party have chosen to make the most of that political reality, quietly raiding Medicare to fund Obamacare but otherwise leaving the program to its sorry fate. They have denied the need for reform. It would take real political courage to do otherwise.

To their enormous credit, congressional Republicans over the past few years have decided that they cannot leave Medicare to collapse and take the government’s finances (and the nation’s economic future) with it, and so they must address the problem despite the standing threat from the left to demonize anyone who tries. Thanks to the creativity, tenacity, and flexibility of Paul Ryan in particular, they have worked through several different versions of a market-based reform of the system, and earlier this year they arrived at one that effectively addresses the key concerns of past critics of such “premium support” reforms — an idea that could dramatically improve the efficiency of Medicare (and so reduce its cost) without increasing risks or out-of-pocket costs for beneficiaries.

Because Mitt Romney (to his own enormous credit) has endorsed that reform, and because Paul Ryan (its architect) is now Romney’s running mate, this idea will come under blistering attacks in the coming weeks and months. Medicare will not be the central issue of this fall’s campaign — economic growth and jobs are far more important to voters. But President Obama and his supporters seem intent on distracting voters from the failed economic policies of the past four years by scaring them about the Romney-Ryan Medicare reform. And it is already perfectly clear that their criticisms of that reform are based on either a misapprehension or an intentional misrepresentation of the actual proposal, and of the very significant ways in which it differs from past Medicare-reform ideas (including those proposed by Ryan in the past). So it is worth taking a moment to understand the proposal — generally known as the Ryan-Wyden reform after its originators, Paul Ryan and Democratic senator Ron Wyden of Oregon — and to see what its critics are missing or misrepresenting.

Read more

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of

8 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

When Ryan and Guithner were having a back-&-forth on the 2013 budget Obama proposed there was an OMB graph…..Chart 5.1 shown.
It depicts our fiscal cliff.
And Tim G. said so.
He said, in effect, that there was no point in pretending what we might do after our debt begins this unstoppable rise because our country will not survive it.
Period.

Is Obama a fan of Cloward/Piven or what?

How excited are seniors going to be about the Obama-disaster plan when they wake up and realize that 15 unelected bureaucrats are going to be responsible for cutting costs, and therefore services, to Medicare? And when is reality going to set in that the Federal Government, starting with FDR, made promises to seniors that it cannot, and could never, keep? Just take a look at the first person to ever draw a Social Security check and how much she paid in compared to how much she reaped from the program. There is no way that any such Ponzi scheme was EVER sustainable and in fact, would be illegal if done by a private corporation.

The Democrats will never mention that the “Ryan” plan was co-authored by a leftist Democrat who was smart enough to know that the primrose path is laced with poison ivy.

Hot Air points this out:
PolitiFact’s ‘Lie of the Year’ becomes Democrats’ central talking point

PolitiFact made the Democratic Party’s claim that passage of the Ryan plan by the House was a “vote to end Medicare” the “Lie of the Year” for 2011.
“PolitiFact,” its writers noted on Dec. 20, 2011, “debunked the Medicare charge in nine separate fact-checks rated False or Pants on Fire!!!
So,
Saturday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid mails:

By picking Representative Paul Ryan, Governor Romney has doubled down on his commitment to gut Social Security and end Medicare as we know it.

Sunday, DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz:
Appeared on FOX News Sunday to perpetuate the myth that the Ryan plan guts Medicare.

Also Sunday, the Obama campaign:

Paul Ryan’s extreme budget would end Medicare as we know it….

Now, why would team Obama triple down on a lie?
I guess they think it might work.

Ironically, the CBO scores ObamaCare as costing about $2 trillion over its real first decade (2014 through 2023), while remarkably leaving 30 million people uninsured.
The law would also, according to the CBO report, siphon an amount approaching $1 trillion (from 2014 through 2023) from Medicare, thereby making a mockery of Obama’s claims against the Ryan budget.

GREAT ADS for the GOP can come from this.

A huge part of the problem is Medicare Part D, the prescription drug program, created as part of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003. Republicans pretty much took the lid off the cookie jar and set it out on the table for the private sector to help itself to public money. The program contains a provision that specifically forbids the federal government from bargaining on behalf of Medicare for lower prescription drug prices.

I will quote from your favorite source and mine, Wikipedia:

Former Congressman Billy Tauzin, R-La., who steered the bill through the House, retired soon after and took a $2 million a year job as president of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the main industry lobbying group. Medicare boss Thomas Scully, who threatened to fire Medicare Chief Actuary Richard Foster if he reported how much the bill would actually cost, was negotiating for a new job as a pharmaceutical lobbyist as the bill was working through Congress. A total of 14 congressional aides quit their jobs to work for the drug and medical lobbies immediately after the bill’s passage.

If you don’t like Wikipedia, here’s an interesting 2009 article about the Medicare Part D boondoggle from Forbes. You probably won’t like it, either.

@Greg: Only fools quote wikapedia! Unless they are making a point as to how unreliable the info is!

@Randy: In case you didn’t notice, Greg also gave a secondary source. Only ultra-conservative dummies (to use your word) feel Wiki is totally unreliable—and that’s because most of them hate documentation of the truth.

@Nan G: I don’t know where you get your information (which is why documentation is important) but the report from the CBO offers a divergent opinion, with more detail (offering a somewhat more optimistic scenario than you statement allude):

CBO and JCT now estimate that the insurance coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of just under $1.1 trillion over the 2012-2021 period-about $50 billion less than the agencies’ March 2011 estimate for that 10-year period. (For comparison with previous estimates, these numbers cover the 2012-2021 period; estimates including 2022 can be found below.)

Compared with prior law, the ACA is now estimated by CBO and JCT to reduce the number of nonelderly people without health insurance coverage by 30 million to 33 million in 2016 and subsequent years, leaving 26 million to 27 million nonelderly residents uninsured in those years (see Table 3 at the end of the report). The share of legal nonelderly residents with insurance is projected to rise from 82 percent in 2012 to 93 percent in 2016 and subsequent years. That share rose to 95 percent in CBO and JCT’s previous estimate.

http://cbo.gov/publication/43080

I couldn’t find any legitimate source referring to how much was being ‘syphoned’ from medicare.

Many of us Conservatives were against the Med D mess. However, IIRC it is one of the few govt. programs under budget!
With that said, this thread is how the left is lying about what Paul’s plan will do. Folks, please don’t let greg deliberately derail another thread. He knows Levin is right and that’s why he wants to change the subject.

Here is Ryan’s “radical” plan
http://hotair.com/archives/2012/08/14/ibd-ryans-budget-is-hardly-radical/