Medicare

FLASHBACK: Obama Calls Medicare Privatization 'Legitimate' But Problematic Proposal (VIDEO)

Brian Beutler | April 11, 2011, 1:47PM

Barack Obama

Washington is waiting with bated breath for President Obama's Wednesday address on attacking national deficits and debt. Republicans are preemptively objecting to any plan that will involve increasing income taxes on the wealthy. Liberals and Democrats don't know what to think. They worry both that President Obama's proposal won't be progressive enough on the merits and will undermine their ability to counter a GOP plan that reduces debt by eliminating Medicare and dramatically slashing and changing Medicaid.

Just over a year ago, though, Obama gave us a peek behind the curtain when he debated House Republicans at their annual retreat in Baltimore, MD. Toward the end of the 90 minute back and forth, Obama addressed Paul Ryan's Roadmap for America's Future, and its very similar Medicare privatization scheme.

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Health Care

House GOP's 'Radical' Plan For Medicare, Medicaid

Brian Beutler | April 4, 2011, 10:23AM

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) at the fiscal commission.

If anything will make it easier for House conservatives to back off on shutting down the government this week, it's the prospect of a different, and much larger fight over the federally funded social safety net. House Republicans are preparing to introduce a 10-year budget Tuesday that will eliminate Medicare and replace it with a private insurance system that closely resembles the new health care law, and end Medicaid as an entitlement program all together.

This plan, which also will include major restructuring of the tax code and cap discretionary spending, will reduce the deficit by over $4 trillion in 10 years, according to House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan.

Here's what this means if you're elderly, disabled, or poor.

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Roadmap for America's Future

Republicans To Put Entitlements On The Chopping Block

Brian Beutler | February 15, 2011, 8:53AM

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)

Monday, Reps. Eric Cantor (R-VA) and Paul Ryan (R-WI) were almost reading from two different scripts on entitlements. But in reality, Republicans seem to be coalescing around the same objective: to put Social Security and maybe even Medicare on the chopping block.

Cantor, the Majority Leader, announced at a pen and pad with reporters yesterday that the Republican budget would cut entitlements -- and Social Security in particular. Ryan, who chairs the Budget Committee, wouldn't commit to it.

But Ryan isn't exactly afraid of proposing controversial entitlement reforms.

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Entitlements

No More Third Rail? How The GOP Got Its Entitlement-Slashing Mojo Back

Brian Beutler | December 3, 2010, 1:15PM

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and John Boehner (R-OH).

One of the most fascinating political conundrums facing the GOP -- whether or how to avoid conservative over-reach -- might play out sooner than expected, when newly elected GOP members come to town. Despite their proclamations that they'll take a humble approach to governing in the next two years -- that they see the election as a referendum on Democrats, not a vote of confidence in themselves -- leading Republicans are already making plans to turn the classic third rails of politics into major political issues. And they're entering their new majority with as much bravado as they had under President Bush, when their last attempt to slash entitlements went down in flames.

"The third rail is not the third rail anymore," Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the incoming House Budget chairman, told reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast roundtable with reporters yesterday. "The political weaponization of entitlement reform is no longer as potent as it used to be, and the best evidence is this last election."

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Roadmap for America's Future

Tea Partiers Get Seat At Table To Pick Next RNC Chairman

Evan McMorris-Santoro | November 30, 2010, 9:14AM

RNC chairman Michael Steele

With a host of candidates lining up to challenge embattled RNC chairman Michael Steele, one large group of voting RNC members' is bringing in FreedomWorks -- the branch of the tea party run by Dick Armey -- to help with the vetting of candidates.

Solomon Yue, an RNC member from Kansas and a co-founder of the RNC's Republican National Conservative Caucus (a 26-member group of the RNC's 168 voting members that has adopted much of the tea party's rhetoric and message), laid out his plan to bring FreedomWorks and the average tea partier into the process of selecting the next chair in a telephone interview with TPM.

Yue said including tea partiers in the vetting process was required to find the right person for the job. The next RNC chair "doesn't have to be a tea partier," Yue told me, but he or she "needs to be tea party compatible."

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Social Security

Chart Of The Day: Analysis Shows Dramatic Social Security Cuts Under GOP Plan

Brian Beutler | October 22, 2010, 2:41PM

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI)

You hear an awful lot about how the leading Republican plan for Social Security would result in major benefit cuts and the eventual privatization of the program. But we've yet to see how severe those cuts would be for the majority of beneficiaries.

This week, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities issued a report showing exactly that. The analysis, by entitlement expert Paul Van de Water, calculates the combined effects of the two Social Security benefit cuts undergirding the Roadmap for America's Future -- a fiscal plan authored by the GOP's top budget guy Paul Ryan.

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Roadmap for America's Future

Ryan Plans To Push Medicare-Slashing 'Roadmap' On Incoming GOP Freshmen

Brian Beutler | October 6, 2010, 11:00AM

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI)

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) -- the GOP's top budget guy, and author of the "Roadmap for America's Future" that suggests Congress partially privatize Social Security and turn Medicare into a voucher system -- insists that his pet plan is not representative of the GOP's official position on the fiscal future of the country. But he's going to do all he can to make sure the incoming class of Republican House members are well versed in its conservative dogma.

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Medicare

Republicans Dominate Medicare Discussions On White House Fiscal Commission

Brian Beutler | September 9, 2010, 10:40AM

President Obama meets with the leaders of his bipartisan debt commission, Democrat Erskine Bowles, on left, and former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson, on right.

The White House's fiscal commission has become a target for progressive activists in large part because a number of reports and public statements indicate that the panel will recommend benefit cuts to Social Security. Most of the backlash has come from critics calling on the commission's co-chair, Republican Alan Simpson, to resign over controversial public statements he's made about the popular program.

But the commissioners are also grappling with another sensitive entitlement program: Medicare. For a number of reasons, the commission is farther from consensus on Medicare than it is on Social Security: Medicare is a more unwieldy program; the commissioners differ wildly on how to prevent its soaring costs from bankrupting the government; and members have already had a working group meeting dedicated to Social Security in isolation. But the ideological conservatism of the Republicans on the commission -- and, indeed, of the commission as a whole -- combined with Democratic fatigue over health care reform mean that the center of gravity of discussions is tilted to the right.

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