Paul Ryan as the Great Destroyer

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American Spectator:

The White House, "news" media and progressive blogosphere have many faults -- mendacity and collusion, to name the most obvious -- but they cannot be accused of being unpredictable. Thus, when Mitt Romney announced that Paul Ryan would be his running mate on the GOP presidential ticket, it was hardly necessary to consult one's Vedic astrologer to know that the Wisconsin congressman would again be denounced for his dark desire to deprive Granny of health care. And, sure enough, even as Ryan was introduced by Romney as his choice for VP in a series of Saturday appearances, he was being depicted as Ryan, Destroyer of Medicare.

The first and most irresponsible attacks came from bought-and-paid-for purveyors of White House talking points like the stooges at Media Matters, whose super PAC released a 290-page slander manual that claims Ryan would "essentially end Medicare." Likewise, Think Progress opened fire before lunch with a tweet declaring, "If you hate Medicare, you'll love Romney's pick for VP." Then, the "legitimate" outlets began to parrot the Obama campaign's message of the day. ABC News, for example, ran a piece early Saturday afternoon advising that "Critics have called Ryan's 2011 proposal the 'end of Medicare as we know it,' and that's true."

The obvious purpose of these tweets, posts and "news" stories is to scare seniors into voting against Romney and Ryan in November. Ironically, it is Obama's misbegotten health care law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), that should terrify seniors. As Avik Roy points out, "According to the latest estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, ObamaCare will reduce Medicare spending by approximately $743 billion between 2013 and 2022, relative to prior law." Unlike Ryan's Medicare plan, which even ABC admits won't affect anyone over age 55, PPACA's cuts will hit current Medicare beneficiaries.

It should further terrify seniors that Obama has offered no serious plan for reforming Medicare, which is on a fiscal trajectory that actually will destroy the program if something isn't done soon. As Ryan himself told the President in February of 2010 during the charade billed by the White House as a bipartisan Health Care Summit, "Medicare right now has a $38 trillion dollar unfunded liability, that's $38 trillion in empty promises to my parent's generation, our generation, and our kid's generation." Yet the Obama administration has all but ignored the looming Medicare disaster, essentially pretending that the status quo is somehow sustainable.

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The Return of Mediscare

 

On CNN yesterday, Obama strategist David Axelrod claimed that “most of the experts who have looked at this” have said that Paul Ryan’s plan to reform Medicare would put the program “in a death spiral” and “would raise costs on seniors by thousands of dollars.” A day earlier — as Representative Ryan was preparing to accept Mitt Romney’s offer to join his ticket — Obama campaign manager Jim Messina had said the plan involved “shifting thousands of dollars in health-care costs to seniors.”

None of this is true. Any expert who looks at Ryan’s plan — any intelligent and fair-minded person, really — can tell you the actual worst-case scenario for how much more it could make beneficiaries pay: $0.

The claim Axelrod and Messina are making is based on a hostile interpretation of an earlier version of Ryan’s proposal. Ryan has changed the proposal over the last year, however, and Romney has endorsed the new version. The Democratic criticism, applied to the new plan, is indisputably false.

The Romney-Ryan proposal — which has the support of liberal Democratic senator Ron Wyden of Oregon — would let senior citizens choose a coverage plan provided either by the federal government or by a private company. The government would defray the cost of purchasing the plan selected. The providers would submit bids showing the premiums they would charge to cover the benefits Medicare has traditionally offered. The second-lowest bid would set the amount the government would provide for each beneficiary.

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Seniors who picked the second-cheapest provider would have their entire premium paid by the government, and seniors who picked the cheapest would get a check for the difference. Seniors who picked a more expensive plan would have to pay the difference out of pocket.

We have reason to be confident that this arrangement would restrain the growth of costs. A study has just shown that applying the second-cheapest-bidder approach to even the much less robust form of competition in Medicare Advantage would have resulted in a 9 percent reduction in Medicare costs in one year alone. The savings from years of real competition could be enormous.

If, however, competition does not restrain costs, the growth of government spending per beneficiary will be capped at a level a bit above the growth rate of the economy plus inflation. That is the exact level that the Obama administration envisions as well. The administration, however, hopes to reach the target by setting low prices for medical providers and otherwise micromanaging medical markets. There have been many past efforts along these lines, and they have always failed.

Under a worst-case scenario, then, the Romney-Ryan plan costs senior citizens no more than current law. It offers the hope of doing considerably better: of reining in the costs of Medicare, the principal cause of long-term debt disaster, without sacrificing patient choice, the quality of health care, or medical innovation.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/313785/return-mediscare-editors

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Entitlement Crisis Takes Center Stage -Michael Barone

 

On the USS Wisconsin in Norfolk harbor, a coatless Mitt Romney named a tieless Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential nominee.

Romney’s choice was not much of a surprise after he told NBC’s Chuck Todd on Thursday that a “vision for the country, that adds something to the political discourse about the direction of the country” was what he was looking for in his vice president. He added, “I mean, I happen to believe this is a defining election for America, that we’re going to be voting for what kind of America we’re going to have.”

This arguably describes some of the others mentioned as possible nominees, but it clearly fits Ryan.

Ryan doesn’t fit some of the standard criteria for vice president. He hasn’t won a statewide election, held an executive position, or become well known nationally or even in much of Wisconsin.

But more than anyone else, more even than the putative presidential nominee (as impolite as it is to say), Ryan has set the course for the Republican party for the past three years, both on policy and in politics. From his post as chairman of the House Budget Committee, he has made himself not only a plausible national nominee but also a formidable one by advancing and arguing for major changes in entitlement policy.

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He has argued consistently that entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid — are on an unsustainable trajectory. Left alone, they threaten to crowd out necessary government spending and throttle the private sector.

Few public-policy experts, on the center-left as well as the right, disagree. But many politicians, certainly those in the Obama White House, shy away from confronting the entitlement crisis. Better to demagogue your way through one more election cycle and kick the can down the road.

What’s astonishing is that Ryan has persuaded his fellow Republicans to follow his lead. Almost all House and Senate Republicans have voted for his budget resolutions. And they have included his proposal to change Medicare, for those currently younger than 55, from the current fee-for-service system to premium support, in which recipients would choose from an array of insurers, with subsidies to low earners.

Republicans rallied to the Ryan plan during the nomination contest. Newt Gingrich was lambasted for calling Ryan’s budget “right-wing social engineering,” while Romney over time moved to embrace the basic elements of Ryan’s budget and Medicare reforms.

Ryan campaigned enthusiastically for Romney in the Wisconsin primary, and there was clearly a rapport between these two number crunchers. Romney would sometimes defer to Ryan to answer questions and made a point of staying in touch with him after clinching the nomination.

As a number cruncher, Romney surely recognizes that Ryan knows federal budget policy about as well as anyone. And the sometimes politically tone-deaf Romney must admire Ryan’s ability, honed in hundreds of town meetings in his marginal congressional district, to explain his stances in a way that wins over ordinary voters.

 

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/313779/entitlement-crisis-takes-center-stage-michael-barone