Paul Ryan was picked for some reason as the vice presidential candidate on Mitt Romney’s GOP ticket. Ryan is the same douche bag who wrote a budget plan that would turn Medicare into a voucher system. Why did Romney put the senior citizen vote, one of the last groups who would vote Republican, into play for 2012?
Here are the facts about Paul Ryan and Medicare:
Let me see if I can’t make this so simple, even corporate journalists can understand. The average 65-year-old person gets Medicare Part A for free, and pays $96.40 a month for Medicare Part B. Then they pay $10-50 a month for prescription coverage, depending on which Medicare Part D coverage they buy. Okay, so most people pay no more than $150 a month for insurance that covers most things. Then they buy “medigap” insurance for the things that aren’t covered by Part A. That runs $500 and up annually.
If you buy all those policies, you’re covered. No worries about “what if.”
And what does the Ryan proposal offer? Basically, it’s a coupon. Instead of covering you for all those things, it pays a fixed amount — and anything over that is your problem. People who aren’t network news anchors or high-profile columnists don’t make enough money to pay for what the Ryan proposal doesn’t cover, and as a result, seniors won’t get the medical care they need and some of them will die as a result.
Here is a more wonkish look at the Paul Ryan Medicare idea:
These plans get at the basic disagreement between Democrats and Republicans on Medicare. Democrats believe the best way to reform Medicare is to leave the program intact but vastly strengthen its ability to pay for quality. Republicans believe the best way to reform Medicare is to fracture the system between private plans and traditional Medicare and let competition do its work.
It’s worth saying there’s no particularly good evidence for either option. Competition hasn’t worked very well in the health-care system. Indeed, Medicare currently includes private options through the Medicare Advantage program. The idea was these private, managed-care alternatives would be cheaper than traditional Medicare. As it turned out, they ended up costing about 20 percent more.
As for the pay-for-quality revolution that the Obama administration envisions, that hasn’t been proven at Medicare’s scale, either.
The point is that Ryan’s idea hasn’t worked and Obama’s plan may not work but the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act doesn’t cut benefits like the Ryan plan does.
Medicare and Social Security aren’t give aways. People paid into them when they were working with the promise of getting that money back when they retired.
What does Paul Ryan want to so with the money freed up by giving us a coupon that won’t keep up with the cost of health care?
Tax cuts for the 1% of course while adding to the tax burden of the middle class and poor.
So who is going to tell Grandma that Paul Ryan wants her to die?
