I find birthers and the huge media sales devoted to promoting birthers disgusting and shameful and wrong, as individuals, but it occurs to me that this insanity does more than hurt my feelings. It distracts. Maybe deliberately, maybe inadvertently, I don’t know, and honestly, I no longer care. I don’t have time to parse the political or financial motives of the soul-dead zombies pushing this garbage.
Know this: Paul Ryan is proposing to radically change the health care system. Because Paul Ryan isn’t just waving around a budget, he’s laid out the Paul Ryan Health Care Plan, and, incredibly, no one noticed.
This is a radical restructuring of the whole health care system, much more radical than the PPACA. The PPACA doesn’t gut Medicare, Medicaid and S-CHIP and the Paul Ryan Health Care Plan does. With huge changes in those four programs, we’re talking about millions of people.
Further, these huge changes in Medicare and Medicaid and S-CHIP
will be felt by every single person in the country, because the programs he’s gutting are so big that this will be felt throughout the whole system. Health care is a system that developed over time. It doesn’t work, and it costs too much and it doesn’t serve anyone well, but it’s an existing system, and the pieces interlock.
The Paul Ryan Health Care Plan radically transforms Medicare and Medicaid and S-CHIP and each and every one of us will be dealing with the consequences.
So, Paul Ryan proposes to change the entire US existing health care system, much more dramatically than President Obama and the Democrats ever dreamed of doing, and media go running off after Donald Trump. It’s mind-boggling, when you think about it.
Here are the basics on Paul Ryan’s Health Care Plan. The first part is a brief run-down of the programs that would undergo huge changes in the Paul Ryan Health Care Plan:
(pdf)
On April 5, 2011, Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI), chairman of the House Budget Committee, released a budget proposal, entitled The Path to Prosperity: Restoring America’s Promise, which reduces federal spending over the long term.
The proposal is projected to achieve a federal budget surplus by 2040, and would substantially reduce federal spending on major health programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and Exchange subsidies by 2022. The proposal would reduce the growth in Medicare spending by capping the growth in expenditures per enrollee, converting Medicare from a defined benefit plan to a system of defined “premium support” payments, and by gradually raising the age of Medicare eligibility from 65 to 67, beginning in 2022. The proposal would also repeal specified provisions of the 2010 health reform law. It would repeal the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) and provisions to close the Medicare Part D prescription drug coverage gap (the “doughnut hole”) by 2020.
This part is just the intro to the Medicare changes:
The proposal would gradually transform Medicare into what is described as a “premium support system.” Beginning in 2022, all newly eligible Medicare beneficiaries (i.e., individuals turning 65 as well as younger, disabled individuals becoming eligible for Medicare) would only have access to health coverage through private insurance plans, rather than through the current government-run Medicare program (i.e., traditional Medicare), or under a Medicare Advantage plan.
Under the new premium support system, Medicare beneficiaries would be entitled to a payment from the federal government to help defray premiums and other health care costs under the plan. The government would make payments directly to private health plans on behalf of Medicare-eligible enrollees, rather than pay hospitals, physicians, and other medical providers directly for the services provided to their Medicare-eligible patients, as is currently the case. If the government payments to plans on behalf of enrollees were insufficient to cover premiums and/or other costs, beneficiaries would be responsible for additional costs. In other words, Medicare would no longer provide coverage for medical care, but instead provide a “subsidy” toward the purchase of a private health insurance plan.
Discuss. We’ll look in detail at the other massive changes that The Paul Ryan Health Care Plan would entail at a later date, because it looks like we’re on our own here.
BGinCHI
What needs to happen, somewhere that a lot of people can see it, is a specific chart with a sample of people and how they would be specifically affected by the Ryan plan.
This is what I’d do if I had a class and was teaching this. I’d make a chart of what a 55 year old, a 65 year old, and 75 year old person would have currently and then once the Ryan plan kicked in, if it was passed. We could see the differences. Maybe Stewart could do this instead of making fun of Glenn Beck.
Then I would show how those under 55 will be affected, both in terms of HC and in terms of how they’ll pay into the system.
Graphics.
Suicidal Zebra
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: for all its’ faults, of which there are fewer than you may have been led to believe, I still love my NHS.
Anyone in the rest of the world will read Paul Ryan’s plan to be exactly what it is: a fucking abomination.
Kay
@BGinCHI:
That’s the thing, though. We’ll need analysis of that. The PPACA was (partly) designed not to disrupt the currebnt health care system. It leaves the majority in place (and expands Medicaid).
The Ryan Plan starts from scratch.
Bobby Thomson
Math is hard, and political “journalists” are (with few exceptions) stupid. Hence the obsession with birthers and other shiny objects requiring no professional skills.
Lolis
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2011_04/029125.php
This seems worse to me than even the Ryan plan, because we have Democrats championing it in the Senate. I am not sure why nobody is writing about this awful spending cap idea.
Delia
What I would like to know is how private insurers would intend to cover people over 65 (cost of premiums, conditions excluded, co-pays, etc.). I believe LBJ pushed Medicare through in the first place because private insurance companies wouldn’t cover seniors.
BGinCHI
@Kay: Amazing, isn’t it, that the Ryan plan doesn’t have a specific run-through of how it would affect individuals?
The disrespect for people in that plan is, how should I put it, criminal?
Death Panels de jure.
WaterGirl
Kay, we are so lucky to have you as a BJ front pager. i really appreciate your posts.
You share one very important trait with our President: You keep your eye on the ball, even as others are distracted by shiny objects.
kay
@Delia:
That’s just one piece (good catch). Insurance operates on risk pools. What happens when you dump the highest risk people into the existing private pool?
It is amazing to me that this isn’t being discussed.
danimal
So, Donald Trump and the birthers are just this years ‘kid in a well’ or ‘beauty in distress’?
Might be true. Fox/GOP is clever in the way they throw smoke in the air when the news cycle is turning against them.
They will regret the Ryan budget vote every day for the next year and a half. They moved quickly, but not smartly.
kay
@WaterGirl:
Thank you. It’s a lot of fun. I went to a legal seminar so had time to think about this :)
madmatt
Yes but we already KNOW that republicans are hateful lying scum who want senior citizens dead, just like we know the democrats have agreed to help them in this goal!
Why are you constantly surprised by how hateful these scumbags who have spent 20 years whining about medicare etc are? As far as why TV doesn’t cover it..TV caters to morons who don’t believe in birth certificates.
Tom Levenson
This.
I promise to write more about this, on the rare occasions I’ll get to write over the next several.
How’s that for thought-reform?
Villago Delenda Est
Ryan is Randroid scum.
All you need to know about this asshole.
agrippa
Ryan is advocating a radicall transformation of the system, and few are discussing/analyzing it.
I wonder who actually wrote it and if Ryan actually read it or understood it.
Good work, kay!
birthmarker
Kay, Kay…Who do you think owns big media? The same corporationists who benefit from Republican policy.
Redshift
@agrippa: Presumably his staff did a lot of the work, but unlike a lot of the ideologues, Ryan seems like a bright enough sociopath to understand exactly what he’s proposing. He’s just not smart enough to accept that the Free Market Ponies that according to the received wisdom of conservative “think” tanks will solve all of our problems have been repeatedly contradicted by reality.
Redshift
@BGinCHI: Yeah. I know I’m just the right age to be completely screwed by this, but I’d like it if someone could crunch the numbers for me to explain that to other people.
A Farmer
Did you hear last night on Marketplace that states with governors claiming that Obamacare is unconstitutional have much lower rates of participation in high-risk pools than states where governors welcome the program?
John
Okay, so a person is 55 now, turns 65 in 2012 but then still doesn’t have access to this new system because the eleigibility age is now 67? Also, as I understand it, this rolls back almost all the provisions of the current system so insurance companies will be able to use pre-existing conditions to refuse a person. What senior doesn’t have pre-existing conditions?
agrippa
@Redshift:
Well, “free market ponies” are an abstraction that do not actually exist; those creatures are cousins to unicorns.
I hope that people are able to understand that the plan is intellectual and moral rubbish.
rikryah
keep these coming
Bob Loblaw
Are you sure this post wasn’t meant for like a month ago or something?
I was under the impression that the relatively more informed denizens of the blog world were already well aware of Ryan’s plan to repeal the PPACA and replace Medicare with a capped voucher system.
Bulworth
No, no, no, no. Ryan’s plan is Bold. Obama’s PPACA was “radical” soshulizm.
slag
So, freedom’s just another word for reintroducing the middleman?
Why give up Medicare’s saving on administration by handing it over to insurance companies whose admin costs are substantially more? Is this some sort of roundabout jobs creation program?
Culture of Truth
This is more than just a plan or proposal, it’s passed the House of Representatives. That’s worthy of a bit of news.
A Farmer
Also, I don’t think insurance companies will want to touch this with a ten-foot pole because Republicans are putting them in the place where they have to charge outrageous prices because they can’t negotiate as brutally as Medicare, and they have to be the ones to kill grandma.
They don’t want to do the Republicans’ dirty work, because they just won’t make enough money while taking on dramatically higher risks.
Zifnab25
do private firms even cover people above 65? I just imagine the market would barely exist for these folks. Who would even try to compete with free virtually unlimited care?
Redshift
@Delia: From having looked at the section of the Ryan plan about health insurance pools after the appalling Politifact business, the plan establishes a regulated “exchange” that is superficially similar to the ones in the ACA, but with these key differences:
– If insurers want to participate in it, they must offer coverage to all members. However, since the pool will only include seniors, there’s no reason to believe any insurer providing decent policies will want to participate.
– There’s no indication that insurance companies in it must charge the same rate to all members, or all members of the same age.
– There’s no indication that the coverage will be useful, adequate, or not just a high-priced rip-off. There’s no mention of any mechanism to make it affordable.
So in short, the only “guarantee” of coverage (contrary to Politifact’s blithe assertion) is that an exchange will exist that may not have anything in it, or may only be stocked with “products” that are little more than scams, but that will gain a government stamp of approval.
Redshift
@A Farmer: You have a higher opinion of the ethics of health insurance companies than I do. Some of them may avoid it for the bad publicity, but there will be plenty of companies willing to offer expensive policies that don’t actually cover anything much when you read the fine print, and walk away with the premiums collected from easily-confused seniors. It would hardly be worse than the stuff they routinely do now to avoid payouts cutting into their profits.
Villago Delenda Est
@A Farmer:
Have to agree with Redshift, you’re assuming that modern American insurance companies have the sense of German insurance companies that felt compelled, by fiduciary duty, to pay out claims made by Jewish businesses damaged on Krystalnacht, despite the demands by the Nazi government that they refuse to pay the claims.
They don’t. They are predators without remorse.
Villago Delenda Est
@A Farmer:
Have to agree with Redshift, you’re assuming that modern American insurance companies have the sense of German insurance companies that felt compelled, by fiduciary duty, to pay out claims made by Jewish businesses damaged on Krystalnacht, despite the demands by the Nazi government that they refuse to pay the claims.
They don’t. They are predators without remorse.
A Farmer
I think they remember how badly people hated them in the heyday of the HMO, and this would be 10 times that. Plus, how do they recoup the money if they get really unlucky on a pool as likely to have tremendous issues as a big bunch of old people?
rickstersherpa
Senator McCaiskell, like President Obama,read the polls superfically where it states that moderate independents are unhappy about “deficits.” Of course, what they are really unhappy about is that the economy sucks and gas prices are near $4.00 a gallon (and no one, left or right is honest about that thar or has been in 40 years – because the easy oil has been found and we are now approaching two billion car drivers in the world. Hence supply and demand).
catclub
@Kay: “The Ryan Plan starts from scratch.”
Actually, I think the Ryan plan INCLUDES a repeal of the PPACA, but it also includes savings that are due to the PPACA in order to reduce the deficit.
Note that the Ryan plan claims to close the medicare D donut hole, but the PPACA already closes that. In that case there are assuming repeal of PPACA so that there will be a benefit to the Ryan plan.
Lori
Thanks for this summary of some problems with the Ryan Plan. He’s giving a townhall on the 29th I may attend. I’m open to suggestions for good questions to ask him!
rickstersherpa
And as far as the health care plan and its effects, the Village in indifferent. “News,” and this goes for MSNBC, NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN as well as Fox is just part of the entertainment business. Its all about drawing eyeballs to your shows. Educating the people about an issue is just so boring. Calling out individuals and powers that be in the media is just dangerous to one’s career. Explaining that gas prices are going up because all the cheap oil has been found and a couple billion people in China, India, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America now want to drive cars have bid up the price is just to presumed to be to complicated for our simple minds. Instead, lets bring in the clowns and talk race resentment since Obama has failed to do a Clinton and given the media a juicy sex scandal.
Ash Can
Great post as always, Kay. Thanks for this.
The corporate media obviously can’t be counted on to get the word out on this. I’d like, instead, to see the AARP latch onto this. Nobody in the media will pay any attention to the DFHs on this, but if an outfit the size of the AARP starts kicking asses over this, people will notice.
debg
Kay and everyone else–I’m confronting my state rep. on Friday at a local town hall, and I desperately need a cheat sheet on useful points, because this idiot voted for the Ryan plan. Does anyone know of a link to such a thing? If so, Kay, can you post on the front page? I’m sure many of us could use useful, one-sheet references.
Ash Can
@Lori: My suggestion would be to read up on his bill(s) beforehand and bring a copy with you, then ask him which private insurers he thinks will be willing to insure elderly customers for anything approaching an affordable premium, and read the Medicare-ending passage(s) of his bill back to him when he insists that his bill won’t do what it will. And bring all the older folks you know with you to the town hall.
PurpleGirl
@slag: Crony capitalism of giving money to the private insurance companies. Ultimately, the subsidy would keep being made smaller until it disappeared completely.
ETA: premium support = subsidy
Bob Loblaw
@Lori:
You should ask him about Medicare cost control. It’s probably the most ridiculous math in his whole fraudulent plan.
The Ryan plan abandons anything resembling honest attempts to control the rise in health care spending, in fact it explicitly abolishes any attempt to do so. His whole plan is to “balance” (not really because of his accompanying tax cut policies) the non-cyclical budget deficit by shifting the rising health care costs off the federal books and onto the backs of seniors.
His plan can be distilled down to the idea that to prevent the bankruptcy of the United States (and give rich people their lovely tax cuts), we should bankrupt the elderly instead.
HyperIon
@John wrote:
One of the worst things about getting old is how fast the time goes by.
Fred
Who cares! It’s DOA in the senate anyways and they knew that when they voted for it.
jl
The Ryan plan goes out of its way to avoid or eliminate effective measures to reduce medical care price inflation, and then it indexes increases to the benefits to increases in the Consumer Price Index. The average annual increase in the CPI is only about half that of increase in Medical Care Price Index.
So, assuming the two price indices continue their historical rates, the Ryan plan would over time result in the elimination of Medicare. The schedule of real benefit cuts would be
5 years: 16%
10 years: 30%
15 years: 42%
20 years: 52%
25 years: 60%
30 years: 63%
One could respond that increases consumer sensitivity to costs (the IMHO a very wrongheaded and bogus aspect of consumer driven care movement) and competition would reduce price inflation in medical care. But the provisions that put insurance companies in the drivers seat in every respect makes this a bad bet, since consumers will have to do this through competition between insurance company contracts (that is, corporate promises that can change at any time in the future).
Even if it did work, the process of reductions in the price of health care would be at the expense of timely care for people with chronic illnesses, which would have a major adverse impact on population health (that is, get a lot of sick old people killed off prematurely).
Politifact and CJR seemed to have missed this major issue in their incorrect analysis of the Ryan plan.
The same trick using a mismatch in inflation adjustments was tried for some of the scam to end Social Security under Bush II.
Economists have a lot of objections to the Medical Care Price Index, and there are several alternative indices that have been developed for research purposes (I’ve never seen them used for analysis of total health care expenditure, partly because most of them have not been developed for comprehensive care, but individual conditions and events, such as heart attack or stroke).
Some indices show a ‘per unit’ price decline in terms of real health benefits for treatment for a specific condition, so the price per expected life years after heart attack has stayed the same or dropped. But this is not relevant for a person who has a heart attack and has to buy the current standard of care as a package. You can’t say, you know, I can only afford ten K dollars worth of extra expected life years after my heart attack. Even the best designed consumer driven plan, and fully transparent pricing system can’t avoid the realities of how medical technology works.
Unless the Ryan plan can guarantee lower (or exactly equal) inflation in prices for health care than the CPI, permanently, it is plan to end Medicare completely. IMO, it is just that simple.
Silver
@John:
A dead senior has no pre-existing conditions.
Senyordave
I worked in insurance pricing for 15 years (full disclosure – it was property & casualty, so we did no straight health, although some liability insurance coverages implicitly involve health care costs). The idea of major insurers wanting to take on private health insurance for 65+ people is ludicrous. They will charge an arm and a leg, because it involves breaking a cardinal insurance rule – Adverse Selection.
The Democrats should be talking about nothing but the Ryan plan – ingrain it into everyone’s thoughts that the GOP wants to kill Medicare and replace it with… NOTHING!
The Republicans should be identified with the Ryan plan. There should already be ads doing hypothetical cost comparisons.
Redshift
@Fred:
Yes, that obviously means it’s of no consequence whatsoever, and no one should remember it when it comes time to vote in Senate elections next year…
slag
@PurpleGirl: I don’t know if the subsidy would eventually be made smaller in real dollars, but it’s almost certain that it would be made smaller relative to the increasing cost of healthcare.
Probably the most amazing thing about this healthcare bill is how big of suckers it assumes Americans under 55 today are. That they would actually fall for this scam. It’s like getting people to gamble their entire life savings in a stock market that can only either stay constant or decline in value. Who does that?
Mako
A total overhaul is obviously needed. But this guy has it exactly backwards.
MikeJ
@PurpleGirl:
Also known as a coupon. They really hate it when you say the republican plan is to hand out health insurance coupons.
Brachiator
@Kay: But is the plan bold? Because apparently boldness is what counts.
One thing that’s kind of interesting is this:
So the insurance companies would get a guaranteed payment even if the individual could not be sure that he or she ultimately could find a truly affordable health care plan.
What is this supposed to accomplish? How is this better? How does this ensure that people get affordable care?
Thanks for all your legwork on this. If only journalists would do the necessary legwork.
slag
@slag: Not “real”. “nominal”. yeesh.
Tonal Crow
Why so little discussion of the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s budget?
NaveenM
@John: Every senior has a pre-existing condition. Being old.
BGinCHI
@Tonal Crow: Second word, begins with a “P.”
MikeJ
You would think that the free marketeers would hate the Ryan plan more than anybody. Handing out government coupons will drive the price of insurance up.
Suppose the government gave out a $50,000 coupon to everybody who wanted to buy a car. What do you think a Hyundai Accent would sell for?
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
Questions for Senators at townhalls:
What happens when the Voucher provided to seniors runs out at around $6500 dollars (check that amount, I haven’t seen where that number came from, just heard some quote it). Will seniors just have to incur debt to cover the rest of the bill if it is higher than the voucher?
What mechanism controls the cost? If the government is subsidising $6500 of health care (again, number check), doesn’t the free market just see that as an artificial price inflation, since all seniors will automatically have that extra money, won’t that just increase the cost by some percentage of $6500 to increase profits, since it will be guranteed by the government?
If personal responsibility and choice is paramount in the Republican health care plan, why are you shifting the payments from doctors, who deal directly with the patients and know the best care, to paying insurance companies, who as every doctor will tell you, have problems with paying doctors for the work that they bill. Won’t this result in turning the medicare payment system into the admistrative nightmare that the private health care system currently is? Is this going to result in the same kind of “in network” and “out of network” dance that private insurance puts people through who don’t have medicare, thereby reducing my choice of doctors to what an insurance company says?
Why is the rise in medicare payments tied to inflation, and not health care cost rises? Health care costs have been outpacing inflation by leaps and bounds for years now.
I have more, but these are the ones that come to my mind everytime I think about this.
slag
@Tonal Crow: That is a good question.
JITC
@BGinCHI:
Here you go! Click the PDF link to see many charts.
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/ryan-medicare-plan-winners-losers
The Guardian summarizes this data this way:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/apr/26/healthcare-congress
And that is IF a 65-year-old can get a health plan at all – the entire reason we have Medicare is because insurers refused to insure high-risk seniors.
Midnight Marauder
@John:
Being a senior is a pre-existing condition.
singfoom
@Tonal Crow: Despite it being the most adult plan offered by an involved party so far, the fact of the matter is that the House Progressive Caucus, while aligning with mostly my specific political beliefs, is a completely unimportant group of people, since the house is controlled by Republican Austerians/Randians.
Sure, they have good ideas….but it won’t even get anywhere near out of the house….
JITC
Other ridiculous flaws in Ryan’s “plan”
He and his supporters call it “premium support” instead of a voucher because the so-called premium support will increase with inflation. But as many economists point out, health care costs grow much faster than inflation. So pretty much instantly this “premium support” will support nothing.
Further, it is a provable fact and even common knowledge that Medicare does things much cheaper than private insurance (e.g. Medicare has about a 3% overhead and private insurance averages a 25% overhead). Private insurance is by definition more inefficient. Even Medicare Advantage, a hybrid of public and private insurance is 10% more inefficient than Medicare. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/opinion/11mon3.html#)
Ryan’s plan is great if your #1 concern is cutting government spending and don’t care at all if anyone, senior or not, gets health care. Otherwise, it’s crap.
chopper
what i love the most is that this douchelord’s plan is the most serious idea the GOP has come up with in the last 2 years. the most serious one. privatizing medicare while slashing taxes for the rich cause, well, fuck, why not?
jl
@JITC:
That is another way of presenting the real benefit cuts I put in a comment above.
To repeat, unless the Ryan plan can guarantee the inflation in the price of medical procedures and services is permanently at least as low as the general level of general inflation for final goods and services, then it is a plan to gradually phase out all Medicare.
The mechanism is simple, to gradually drive the real value of the health care insurance voucher to zero in terms of real health care services it can purchase.
The chance of lower health care inflation under the Ryan plan is about zero, given the lack of any market or product regulation, to control market power, or to promote transparency in either the health insurance market or medical care industry.
As I said, during the proposed Bush II Social Security privatization scam, some plans used the same kind of trick to hide a gradual, but complete, phase out of Social Security.
BGinCHI
@JITC: thanks for that link. I forgot about Dean Baker’s work.
But this also demonstrates just how little this stuff is penetrating the MSM. People who are going to be most affected seem to have the least info.
This is a slick con and our media are the Keystone Kops.
inthewoods
@Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac:
I’d add:
How will the Ryan plan guarantee available coverage for seniors when private insurance companies are unlikely to want to provide comprehensive or affordable care to seniors?
inthewoods
@Redshift:
Actually – I like Chris Hayes suggestion here – Reid should bring the bill to a vote in the Senate knowing that it is unlikely to pass and will be vetoed anyway. That would force Republican Senators to vote for it.
gypsy howell
A couple other things to ponder, besides the excellent points already brought up:
As I read somewhere on the internets recently, Ryancare is in essence a 100% estate tax (or “death tax” as republicans like to call it) on middle america. A huge majority of average americans will have run through their entire life savings before they die as a result of the elimination of medicare and, perhaps equally importantly, the slashing of medicaid, which among other things pays for nursing home care for the elderly. Forget about handing down any of your life savings to your children – there won’t be any left.
Also – how great will it be for those couples who have one spouse eligible for medicare and one spouse who gets Ryancare by virtue of being a few years younger. My husband Thurston is going to be pleased as punch to help me negotiate with my Ryancare for-profit insurers while he sails along on medicare when we’re in our 70s. I imagine the difference between the two plans will be rather stark.
I’m glad you mentioned too that the republicans also want to repeal the PPACA, thus freeing the insurers from that pesky “pre-existing conditions” clause.
I called my rep Gerlach’s office (both the local office and the one in DC) a few days ago and really let them have it. I asked both of them what they thought the monthly premium for a 75 or 80 year old with numerous pre-existing conditions might be, given that right now my bill is $1600 per month, and I’ve got decades to go before I reach that age. I also asked them how they thought THEY were going to fare, now that their boss has voted to get rid of medicare, while HE will still get his lifetime taxpayer paid benefits.
I am so fucking pissed about this, I can hardly talk about it.
gypsy howell
@inthewoods:
Don’t be so cocky. You don’t think it could get enough Dem votes to pass it? McCaskill, with her idotic spending cap nonsense? Baucus, who fucked up the current bill? Conrad? Lieberman? Be careful what you wish for, and remember what kind of “democrats” we have in the Senate.
MikeJ
@inthewoods: Budgets are required to start in the house. I don’t think the Senate can vote on it.
JITC
@jl:
You are absolutely correct.
Which is why it’s driving me crazy when I hear a Republican who voted for this plan deny that they voted to end Medicare. They absolutely did.
First, they voted to turn it into a useless subsidy for private insurance. And they voted for a plan that would do exactly what you described.
gypsy howell
Oh for a NY Daily News headline:
REPUBLICANS TO SENIORS: DROP DEAD
inthewoods
@gypsy howell:
Then Obama will veto it – the point is that it can’t make it into law, but get Rethugs to commit.
inthewoods
@MikeJ: I believe the Senate has to vote on the budget from the House before it goes to the President, no? Naturally I’m assuming that budgets follow the same process I learned from “Schoolhouse Rock”.
PurpleGirl
The Ryan Plan was already passed by the House on April 15th. The vote was 235-193.
Dennis SGMM
Claire McCaskill is a co-sponsor of the disastrous CAP act and Joe Manchin has already said that he’ll vote for it as well. I’d bet that these two, as well as some of the other usual suspects, will vote for the Ryan plan just to show the folks back home that they’re real three-fisted fiscal conservatives.
JCT
@Dennis SGMM: And immediately afterwards their vote should be hung around their necks like the big boat anchor it is and they can be shoved overboard with their friends the Republicans.
I think Reid should go for it, if the tables were turned the Republicans would hang this on the Democrats in a second.
The pre-existing conditions issue is just a hoot — the insurers will run for the hills.
I guess the Republicans timed this correctly, most folks around today don’t remember how many of the elderly lived in grinding poverty partially driven by the costs of their medical care. Oh well, IGM so fuck off rules the day again.
Dennis SGMM
@JCT:
I’ll believe that the Democratic party is serious about that sort of retribution the second that I see the party, and Obama, back their opponents in a primary.
grandpajohn
@inthewoods: Absolutely
make the assholes go on record as voting for this POS bill then hang this dead stinking albatross around their necks with a continual barrage of attack ads from now until Nov 2012
JCT
@Dennis SGMM: Sigh, now that would be sweet.
I have a very active fantasy that the Democrats sweep the senate and house, the nonsensical filibuster rules are thrown out and Obama makes the Republicans his bitches for 4 years.
The crying will be sweet, sweet music.
RalfW
It is of course deliberate! The Minnesota GOP is slapping together a state budget that will totally dismantle the 30 year framework that made Minnesota a success, a desirable place to live and work, and far exceed the growth and income rates of our regional neighbors.
They well may get this budget through by rolling out their signature distraction just today: a state gay-marriage constitutional amendment.
Yep – fail to pass a jobs bill, gut education, health care, transportation, and maybe even pass a ban on state insurance exchanges. Get away with it (perhaps, we’ll see how gullible the state voters and press turn out to be) but manufacturing a huge distraction: that gay bugaboo!