Paul Ryan is determined to gut Medicare. This time he might succeed

[GMDino]

Opinion piece.  Shared for a link in the article.


http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/11/17/paul-ryan-has-big-medicare-plans-for-you-jason-sattler/93969860/

Quote:You might assume that you’d need a clear consensus to unwind Medicare, one the most popular things government has ever done that doesn’t involve bombing Nazis.


Paul Ryan knows you just need an opportunity.

While the House speaker successfully avoided any joint appearances with Donald Trump during the campaign, his intention to radically remake Medicare has been proudly parked at abetterway.speaker.gov for months — where it received less attention than Trump’s fourth child from his second marriage.

Medicare was never once brought up in the debates, though it was obvious that aRepublican Congress would almost undoubtedly greet a President Trump. And despite Ryan’s statement that Trump was the best hope to “turn the ideas” in the Better Way agenda “into laws,” the nominee was never asked if he supported Ryan’s plan to turn America’s single-payer retirement health plan for retirees into a “premium support” voucher program.

Perhaps the press simply took Trump’s 2015 promise to not cut any of America’s “entitlement” programs, including Medicare, seriously and literally. That appears to be a huge mistake — perhaps one of the hugest mistakes in 18 months of almost everyone with a byline, including myself, getting almost everything wrong.

As part of his elaborate plan for the greatening of America, Trump’s post-election transition website promises to “modernize Medicare, so that it will be ready for the challenges with the coming retirement of the Baby Boom generation — and beyond.” As Jonathan Cohn noted in The Huffington Post, “those are euphemisms for precisely the kind of Medicare and Medicaid plans Ryan has long envisioned.”
In other words, Trump seems to agree with the newly reelected speaker, who tweeted this week that “it’s time to go big.”
 
Ryan has rarely been shy about his desire to end Medicare as we know it. But he has always been shameless about it.

After Republicans won the House in 2010 in part by arguing that Obamacare was “plundering” Medicare, Ryan used his position in the new GOP House majority to propose his first extreme makeover of the program. It would have slashed the government’s obligations to future retirees by feeding all of them into private insurers, with a coupon to cover some or all of the premiums depending on income.

Revisions of the plan have been slightly less Ayn Randian but they boil down to a simple idea, according to Ian Millhiser at Think Progress: “Republicans want to charge seniors a lot more for inferior health coverage." Ryan’s latest proposal promises to keep an option of “traditional Medicare” for beneficiaries who want it. But we can’t know how much it will cost seniors because the plan “lacks important details — like numbers,” Millhiser noted.

Ryan has already figured out how to get this done: tie the Medicare cuts to the Affordable Care Act known as Obamacare, Barack Obama’s dastardly plot to destroy the nation by driving the percentage of uninsured Americans to the lowest number ever recorded.

Just days after Trump became the president-elect, Ryan established the false premise that he’s hoping to use to end Medicare as we know it. “What people don't realize is because of Obamacare, Medicare is going broke, Medicare is going to have price controls because of Obamacare, Medicaid is in fiscal straits,” he told Fox News’Bret Baier. “You have to deal with those issues if you are going to repeal and replace Obamacare. Medicare has serious problems (because of) Obamacare. Those are part of our plan.”



Naturally, Baier didn’t correct Ryan or mention the undeniable fact that Obamacare has strengthened Medicare, introducing new benefits while adding 12 years of life to its trust fund.


Even conservative health care experts Paul Winfree and Brian Blase don’t dare dabble in the deception Ryan pushed on Fox. They call the reforms made to the single-payer retirement program “the ACA’s Medicare budget savings” and those “savings” are the one part of Obamacare they don’t mind keeping. 
And if Ryan actually cared about balancing the budget he’d be hosting Thriller flash mobs to celebrate how national health spending between 2014 and 2019 is now projected to be more than $2 trillion less than what experts were predicting before Obamacare destroyed America.

Given that the new president seems to have little understanding of the job he’s undertaking and appears to be much more interested in continuing to hold rallies while spending weekends in Trump Tower, expect Ryan to continue in his quest to undo Medicare in its current form, unmolested by facts or Trump.

This is likely to be an unbelievably unpopular proposal that shatters one of Trump’s signature promises. Democrats are ready for this fight — or they should be.

https://www.donaldjtrump.com/media/why-donald-trump-wont-touch-your-entitlements

Quote:- MAY 21, 2015 -


WHY DONALD TRUMP WON’T TOUCH YOUR ENTITLEMENTS
The Daily Signal

Donald Trump says if he runs for president he’ll make sure entitlement programs aren’t touched.


“I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid,” Trump told The Daily Signal. “Every other Republican is going to cut, and even if they wouldn’t, they don’t know what to do because they don’t know where the money is. I do.”
Trump, the successful businessman who has flirted with a political career in the past, spent time in Iowa recently to talk about the issues at the top of his agenda.

Using the theme, “Make America Great Again,” Trump vowed to transform the country into a rich and prosperous nation. For starters, he plans to take dead aim at China’s currency manipulation tactics.

“When you look at these killers from China, they’re just taking our money out of our pocket,” he said. “Jobs, our manufacturing, then they loan it back to us. They have $1.3 trillion in our debt. They own it. We are paying them interest on $1.3 trillion. They got it incorrectly with manipulation, currency manipulation and then they loan us back the money that they took from us.”