Steve Benen: How to make the Medicare problem worse

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Steve Benen writes at the Political Animal – How to make the Medicare problem worse:

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the debate over Medicare is the disconnect between the problem and proposed “solution.” The standard Republican line is that Medicare faces a serious financial shortfall in the future, with escalating costs threatening its viability. To deal with the problem, Republicans are pushing a plan that doesn’t deal with escalating costs at all.

Indeed, what’s often overlooked is the fact that the GOP plan to “save” money through Medicare “reform” actually costs more.

By now, the basics are probably pretty familiar. The Republican plan, as crafted by Paul Ryan, is to scrap Medicare and replace it with a privatized voucher plan. The voucher decreases in value over time, which produces “savings” for the government, not by controlling costs or addressing care delivery systems, but by transferring costs to you. And if the voucher doesn’t cover what you need, well, good luck.

For the GOP, this ruthlessness is just a fiscal necessity. The nation can’t afford Medicare anymore, so these “reforms” are unavoidable. This is absurd on its face, since Republicans intend to spend the difference on tax cuts, not debt reduction, but putting that aside, there’s the small matter of the GOP making care more expensive, not less. Peter Orszag explained the other day:

While more consumer cost-sharing would help reduce unnecessary care, the plan would not live up to its billing in cutting health costs for America. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, it would do the opposite. That’s right: The CBO found that the Ryan Medicare proposal would substantially increase total health-care spending. […]

On the critical metric of whether the Ryan plan would reduce total health-care costs, though, the CBO conclusion is shocking: The plan would not only fail to decrease health-care costs per beneficiary, it would increase them — by an astonishingly large amount that grows over time. By 2030, health spending on the typical beneficiary would be more than 40 percent higher under the Ryan plan than under existing Medicare, according to the CBO report.

Health-care costs would not be reduced on the backs of seniors; they would be raised on the backs of seniors. 

I can appreciate why this sounds ridiculous. The Republican plan to reduce the debt doesn’t really reduce the debt? The Republican plan to reduce health care costs increases health care costs? The Republican plan to save Medicare actually eliminates Medicare?

Actually, yes. None of this criticism is in any way hyperbolic.

What should be the point of Medicare “reform” is making the system cost less. The plan pushed by the GOP in the House and Senate makes the system cost more, only in this scenario, it’s seniors on a fixed income who’ll bear the increased burden. This, they assure us, is an example of fiscal responsibility.

It’s as if the whole party is taking crazy pills.

Media professionals who genuinely believe the Paul Ryan agenda is courageous and sensible haven’t taken the time to do their homework. It’s snake oil in a medicinal bottle.

Benen writes in a later post, Don’t use a scam to launch ‘a serious debate’:

I desperately wish credible media voices recognized Ryan’s Republican plan for what it is: a fraudulent scam. Using this con job as “a launching off point for a serious debate” is comparable to using alchemy as a launching off point for a serious debate about chemistry, or astrology as a launching off point for a serious debate about space travel.

Kevin Drum put it this way the other day, “You need to get the policy right. You need to actually care about controlling healthcare costs. You need to actually care about delivery systems. You need to actually care about what works and what doesn’t. You need to actually care about the details. Paul Ryan doesn’t. He’s a right-wing ideologue with a single right-wing solution for everything. But he’s sociable and friendly, not a fire breather, so everyone figures he’s not one of the tea party nutjobs. This is a serious mistake.” [He is an Ayn Rand acolyte.]

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Paul Krugman recently explained, “Here’s an analogy: think of Medicare as a footbridge that is deteriorating and will eventually become unsafe. You could propose structural repairs to fix its faults; Ryan doesn’t do that. Instead, he proposes knocking the bridge down and replacing it with trampolines, in the hope that pedestrians can bounce across the stream.”

* * *

Overall, there are two broad ways of scrutinizing the GOP’s Medicare privatization plan. The first is to emphasize its needless cruelty towards seniors, which is problematic for those who believe Medicare beneficiaries deserve better. He wants to shift costs onto seniors and use the “savings” for tax cuts, all while pretending to care about a non-existent debt crisis.

The other is to note that Paul Ryan’s numbers simply don’t add up, making his approach unworthy of serious consideration. The combination of the two points to a proposal worthy of the trash heap, not “serious debate.”

The question isn’t why the left would treat this scam as “an object of derision”; the question is why others aren’t doing the same.