Paul Ryan's Disastrous Prescription For Medicare

First the good news: U.S. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) has made a serious proposal meant at reforming Medicare to keep it from going insolvent.

Now, the bad news: His idea would gut it to the point of irrelevance.

Ryan revealed a budget reform package totalling $4 trillion in spending cuts and turning Medicare into a voucher system. Seniors currently on Medicare would continue to have the coverage they have today, but future generations - say, mine - would have Medicare reduced to an annual stipend to buy insurance in the private marketplace. There, they would have a multitude of choices among insurance policies . . . but only two choices of coverage - cut-rate insurance that doesn't cover much or expensive insurance that a voucher could only pay for a fraction of. Beneficiaries would have to pay more of their own money for health insurance in a private system in which covering old people - who tend to get sick a lot - isn't very profitable. So do you think they could be guaranteed even half the coverage today's old folks get?

But wait - there's more! Ryan would also turn federal funding for Medicaid, the health insurance plan for the poor, into block grants for the states, which would choose how best to allocate the funds. Good idea, until you realize that while, say, New York or California might be amenable to continue the current level of Medicaid coverage, a state like, say, Mississippi - notorious for its miserly attitude toward the poor - might want to spread coverage rather thinly and spend as little money as possible.

Ryan, like most Republicans hell-bent on screwing the average American, doesn't believe there's not enough revenue - rather, there's too much spending - and he doesn't see the need for more taxation. Not even for corporations like General Electric, which paid no taxes last year despite $26 billion in profits. Ryan says his plan "saves" Medicare, reminding me of the U.S. army major (never accurately identified) in the Vietnam War who said, after the shelling of the village of Bến Tre to ferret out Viet Cong fighters, "It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it."

Who is Ryan kidding with his proposed attack on Medicare? Apparently, only 23 percent of us - that's how many Americans would support a Medicare overhaul, according to a recent poll, while 76 percent strongly oppose it. (I wonder how much more information the remaining one percent need to make up their minds!) Nevertheless, I have a nasty feeling that Ryan's plan will pass in much of its original form. Why? Because Republicans always get what they want.

And they pay (and get paid) good money to get it.