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Trump ain't phasing out Medicare, no way
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...democrats-need
Paul Ryan’s plan to phase out Medicare is just what Democrats need
By Paul Waldman
Democrats have been feeling many emotions over the last week — anguish, fear, rage, and despair, for starters. Now that their heads are clearing enough to begin asking themselves how they can mount an effective opposition to Donald Trump and the Republican Congress over the next four years. One of the first tasks is to find a battle to fight. It isn’t enough to just pick up the paper or check the internet in the morning and be horrified at whatever new appointments Trump is contemplating; for Democrats to regain their focus, they need a specific controversy around which they can organize and potentially notch a win. And it looks like they may have found it.
I’m speaking of Paul Ryan’s wish to privatize Medicare, or phase it out, depending on how you want to look at it. In an interview last week with Fox News, Ryan made clear that as part of the legislative bacchanal Republicans have planned for Trump’s first months in office, he plans to begin the Medicare phaseout he has long advocated. He seems to want to package it together with the repeal of the Affordable Care Act: “Well, you have to remember, when Obamacare became Obamacare, Obamacare rewrote Medicare, rewrote Medicaid. If you are going to repeal and replace Obamacare, you have to address those issues as well,” he said. “What people don’t realize is because of Obamacare, Medicare is going broke.”
As part of his strategy, Ryan must convince people that Medicare is all but dead already, so we don’t actually lose much by putting it out of its misery. That’s why he says things like, “Because of Obamacare, Medicare is going broke.” This is not just a lie but the precise opposite of the truth, and Ryan knows full well it is; in fact, the ACA extended the solvency of the Medicare trust fund by over a decade. And be warned: Any time you hear Republicans say the phrase “en lement reform,” understand that phasing out Medicare is what they’re talking about.
When Democrats say Ryan wants to “privatize” or “phase out” Medicare, Republicans protest that he and they only want to reform it, strengthen it, save it. This is baloney. (I’d use a slightly different word were this not a family paper.) If Ryan gets his way, Medicare as a universal insurance program will cease to exist. It will be replaced by “premium support,” or vouchers which seniors will use to buy private insurance. If you can’t afford any of the available plans with what the voucher is worth, tough luck. The whole point is to transfer the expense from Medicare to the seniors themselves. Half a century after Medicare brought health security to America’s seniors, Republicans would snuff it out, leaving some unknown number without any coverage at all and breaking the fundamental promise the government made.
Understanding just how much senior citizens love this big-government program of single-payer health insurance, Ryan and other Republicans have always tried to sell privatization by telling seniors that they shouldn’t worry because the changes they’re proposing won’t take effect for a while. You’ll still have the Medicare program you love, they say. It’s those who come after you who will be without it. For whatever combination of reasons this argument has never been persuasive; perhaps seniors just don’t trust it, or perhaps they want to make sure their children and grandchildren enjoy the same health security they do. But whenever Republicans have considered making a privatization push, they’ve quickly changed their minds as they contemplated the almost inevitable backlash.
But now they may have the boldness to give it another shot. For Ryan and other Republicans, phasing out Medicare is a high-risk, high-reward game. Getting rid of it is a beautiful dream, because Medicare is a living rebuke to everything Republicans argue about government programs: It’s a gigantic en lement that has solved a significant societal problem, works efficiently, and is spectacularly popular. If they could privatize it and then begin to shrink it down little by little, they could then do the same to Medicaid, to CHIP, to anything. As Ryan says on his website, “Medicare is the cornerstone on which all other government health care programs rest.”
Ryan knows the political dangers he faces in trying to phase out Medicare, but he also knows that a chance like the one he has now doesn’t come along very often. So he seems determined to move forward, and that gives Democrats a tremendous opportunity.
An effort to phase out Medicare will unite liberals and give them one specific thing to direct their energies toward. It’ll make the consequences of unified Republican rule vivid and concrete. It will also enable them to apply pressure to every member of Congress in a way that the parade of Trump administration horrors may not. A Republican congressman from Alabama doesn’t care if a few of his cons uents are appalled that President Trump will have a white nationalist as his senior adviser. But a threat to their Medicare? Hoo boy. Now that’s trouble.
So as much as the 2016 presidential campaign showed the danger of making predictions in politics, I feel comfortable making this one: Ryan’s effort will fail. If he actually tries to move ahead with a privatization plan, there will be a revolt. Even Republican members of Congress who agree with Ryan’s anti-government goals and who would like to see Medicare die will be terrified of their angry cons uents and will quickly abandon him. At some point, President Trump — who has no genuine beliefs about any of this and therefore no ideological commitment to privatizing Medicare — will pull the plug.
And Democrats, having beaten back this effort one more time, might begin to see a glimmer of hope. They’re going to lose a lot in the next four years, perhaps more than they can truly understand at this stage. But they won’t lose everything.
Trump ain't phasing out Medicare, no way
It's right there on his transition website, "modernize" Medicare.
https://www.greatagain.gov/policy/healthcare.html
so is ryan going back to "makers and takers" talk again?
and you take "modernize" to mean "phase out"? That's a stretch, imo. Modernize could mean raising the age as we're living longer now.
I doubt they touch it for current seniors since they still need them to vote Republican in 2018, but Ryan and Trump are going to over every younger generation. We'll get to keep paying for seniors' medicare and then we'll get worthless vouchers when we hit 65.
Ryan has already said privatization is happening. Trump's just trying to sell it now.
Clinton is such a piece of for never bringing up that this was going to happen under a President Trump with a Republican congress. ing . Let's just talk about Alicia Machado.
Someone needs to take a tally of all the times you've chosen to check out intellectually during your unwavering Trump support.
"I'll tell you what. Why don't we take all these bricks and build a shelter for the homeless, so maybe your mother will have a place to stay."
-Billy Hoyle
Did he ever go away from it? I thought the Ayn Rand selfish asshole thing was his shtick.
The way I see it is that in 40 years when I'd be eligible, America is either going to be a bankrupt 3rd world country or it will have passed universal healthcare like the rest of the modern world by then.
This is what I'm predicting will happen. Once the Baby Boomer generation is extinct that's when I think we'll pass reform for universal healthcare. We are about 20-30 years way from most of them being wiped out.
IMO, Trump and Ryan have very different ideas on Medicare - asik, Trump hasn't mentioned touching Medicare or SS during his campaign. The word "modernize" on his website doesn't mean that he agrees with Ryan or he's trying to sell privatization - more likely it means slowly bump up the age.
Anybody wonder just WHY? Ryan wants to destroy Medicare, Medicaid, ACA? and then SS later, maybe sooner.
Of course he didn't mention it, he knows Romney lost the 2012 election on scrapping Medicare.
O/U on RMT coming to grips with the fact that Donald is a fraud and said whatever he needed to get elected? I give this one 5 years. Come 2021 RMT may accept the reality she got duped by a fraud.
I don't know man, the US is pretty ing stubborn on everything it seems. We're like the only country in the world that still uses 12th century units for measurement instead of the much simpler metric system, for instance. I don't know where the money for universal healthcare comes from as long as we're blowing tax dollars playing world police with military bases all over the globe.
So why the projection of Ryan's Medicare wishes on Trump? The above articles specifically states that Trump will pull the plug on Ryan's privatizing Medicare.
Yeah I don't buy a word Trump campaigned on. He's looking like a Trojan horse into Washington for the GOP.
He didn't say anything about Medicare - posters are projecting.
He said it on his transition website, what are you talking about?
Based on this, increasing my O/U to 8 years.
Trump is just channeling Frank Luntz by using a nice buzzword to make the GOP's Medicare plan sound reasonable.
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