Ryan and Medicare: A Recipe for Increased Costs

Against the background of Mitt Romney's continuing attacks on Barack Obama and Medicare, PolitiFact checked a statement by Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter. "You know, I heard Mitt Romney deride the $700 billion cuts in Medicare that the president achieved through health care reform," Cutter told Face the Nation. "You know what those cuts are? It’s taking subsidies away from insurance companies, taking rebates away from prescription drug company. Is that what Mitt Romney wants to protect? And interestingly enough Paul Ryan protected those cuts in his budget."

Not surprisingly -- since they also rated Romney's statements on this subject "mostly false" - PolitiFact rated this as "true."

But none of this is extremely surprising. It's a well-established fact that the Romney campaign is built on a mountain of lies. And this is yet another -- PolitiFact goes further than Cutter and argues that it's dishonest to even call the amount a cut. "Well, there are cuts and then there are CUTS. Neither Obama nor his health care law literally 'cut' a dollar from the Medicare program’s budget," the editors write. "Rather, the health care law instituted a number of changes to reduce the growth of Medicare costs. At the time the law was passed, those reductions amounted to $500 billion over the next 10 years."

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So When's Ryan Going to Bring All This Supposed 'Substance?'

Well thank God Mitt Romney chose Paul Ryan to be his running mate. Now we can finally have a debate of substance. This has been the media's line -- as they've gone straight to covering Ryan's workout schedule. But don't blame the media entirely. They're only half-wrong on this one. They're being forced to cover a physical fitness infomercial because Paul Ryan is a man largely without substance. He pretends to be a serious, wonkish deepthinker -- and the media has inexplicably fallen for it -- but when you start examining the facts and cracking the numbers, the most substantial thing about Paul Ryan is his status as a P90X success story.

For example, consider this headline from Talking Points Memo -- "Paul Ryan Slams His Own Medicare Cuts In Ohio":

Speaking at his alma mater Miami University in Ohio, Paul Ryan slammed President Obama for adopting Medicare cuts that, until last week, were openly supported by Ryan himself.

“The president, I’m told, is talking about Medicare today,” Ryan said. “We want this debate.”

Ryan went on to say that “what I don’t think he’ll be telling people is that the president took $716 billion from the Medicare program — he raided it to pay for Obamacare.”

Like Romney, Ryan has pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which included $716 billion in savings taken from health care providers, not seniors’ benefits. But unlike Romney, Ryan wrote and passed two Republican budgets that kept the cuts in place.

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Selection of Ryan Has Many on the Right Almost as Worried as They Should Be

Part of the media consensus on Mitt Romney's choice of running mate seems to be that conservatives just love Paul Ryan to pieces. And that's true, up to a point. The Tea Party types think he's great, but they're reactionaries who measure a politician by the responses of liberals -- lefties hate him, so he must be OK. And, of course, the rightwing punditry likes him for similar reasons; liberals will fight this guy tooth and nail and conflict equals ratings.

But there's one group on the right who don't like Mitt Romney's choice at all. We'll call them "people who know what the hell they're talking about" or PWKWTHTTAs.

Politico:

Away from the cameras, and with all the usual assurances that people aren’t being quoted by name, there is an unmistakable consensus among Republican operatives in Washington: Romney has taken a risk with Ryan that has only a modest chance of going right — and a huge chance of going horribly wrong.

In more than three dozen interviews with Republican strategists and campaign operatives — old hands and rising next-generation conservatives alike — the most common reactions to Ryan ranged from gnawing apprehension to hair-on-fire anger that Romney has practically ceded the election.

While many of these PWKWTHTTAs are genuinely excited to see someone as hard-right as on the ticket, Politico reports that "the more pessimistic strategists... think the Ryan pick is a disaster for the GOP. Many of these people don’t care that much about Romney -- they always felt he faced an improbable path to victory -- but are worried that Ryan’s vocal views about overhauling Medicare will be a millstone for other GOP candidates in critical House and Senate races."

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Paul Ryan, True-Believerism, and the Coming GOP Medicare Fiasco

It's a warning I haven't written about in a while, but beware of true believers. I used it more during the Bush administration, when the neocons were ignoring the fact that the invasion of Iraq just wasn't working. The neocons had a domino theory for Iraq; Saddam Hussein falls and -- for some unexplained reason -- the middle east stabilizes, Israel becomes everyone's buddy, and Democracy breaks out all over the place. Everything was falling down around their ears, but the line from the Cheneyite wing of the White House seemed to be "It will work! It will! The theory is so beautiful and perfect, it can't possibly be flawed."

This is why you should always beware true believers. They're the fanatics, the zealots, the guys who are absolutely certain the flawless idea can't fail. They're the ones who believe that when something's not working, you need to do more of it. And they seem to be incapable of recognizing failure. They're the doctor in the bad medical drama, pounding a patient's chest and shouting, "Damn you! Don't you die on me!" Except the true believer would keep pumping away until the body was stiff. The TV doctor listens when someone tells them it's over, the true believer thinks it's impossible for it to be over.

The neocon true-believerism was bloody and disastrous. Other kinds are simply disastrous. And, luckily, the example of true-believerism offered today only harms the true believers.

Politico:

To Democrats, the release of the House GOP budget is like Christmas in March. And they’re planning a celebration of sorts.

Democrats are organizing media blitzes, House floor speeches and town halls back home to seize on the changes to Medicare that Republicans are expected to propose Tuesday. To blunt GOP talking points that only Republicans are willing to confront the debt, Democrats intend to unveil their own budget next week calling for a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes on the rich.

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Corporate Parasites and the Failure of 'Trickle Down Economics'

If you want one clear message coming from the Occupy Wall Street crowd and the 99-percenters, you can boil all they're saying down into one argument; Reaganomics has failed and should die. After decades of bending over backwards to make sure that helped the wealthy become as wealthy as humanly possible, we see no real positive results. "Trickle down" economics is really the economics of scavenging -- if the wealthy have a big feast, they'll leave a lot of crumbs. And, as we shift the role of government away from helping people to helping business, even the holes left by cutting spending benefit corporations. Remember that after Bill Clinton ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the only real positive impact the reforms had were for the financial industry. A whole new market opened up and payday loan outfits sprouted up all over the nation like mushrooms, charging usurious rates to people with nowhere else to go. And of course, poverty is at an all-time high.

If this is a successful economic model, I think I'd prefer the old "failures" of New Deal liberals, thanks.

Still, all that wealth is sitting up there, just waiting to trickle down. We've sent pots and pots of money up the economic ladder all these years with pretty much nothing to show for it -- except this:


Chart courtesy of Mother Jones

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The Worst Possible Deal?

Let's start with a look at the real world.

Reuters:

More consumers had trouble making payments on credit cards and other debts during the first three months of the year due to higher food and gas prices, an industry report said on Thursday.

The American Bankers Association said the data showed a downturn from prior quarters and described the most recent quarter as a "soft patch."

"Consumers are feeling insecure about the economy and whether their financial resources can carry them through until conditions improve," ABA chief economist James Chessen said in a statement.

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Bush Tax Cuts are a 10 Year Economic Disaster

Republicans aren't serious about debt reduction. By now, this should be obvious. We're told that Paul Ryan's Medicare-slaying plan is serious, as well as courageous, but the truth is that it's neither. It's silly and it involves the nation hiding its head in the sand. We've fought two wars, largely off-budget, and engaged in the biggest failure of economic policy since Hoover's performance before the Depression. Republicans shoveled money into a hole for eight years, yet we're supposed to believe that Medicare is our big problem. In 2010, our military spending made up nearly half of all world military spending combined, yet we're supposed to believe our problem is that we spend too much on grandma's heart medication.

It wasn't that long ago that I put up this graph, but let's look at it again:



The Bush tax cuts came with a lot of promises. We would grow our way out of deficits. Kind of looks like we didn't. Deficits are mindblowing and our economy is a fragile wreck in recovery. As I said the last time I posted that graphic, by every measure and on every promise, the Bush tax cuts failed to deliver.

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GOP Attempts to Whine Their Way Out of Their Medicare Hole

First things first; Republicans have no moral right to talk about a Democratic "Mediscare" campaign. In a (failed) closed-door meeting to knock out some sort of groundwork for an agreement on the deficit and the debt ceiling, President Obama made that about as clear as he's ever going to:

Republican Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, architect of a Medicare overhaul aimed at slashing the cost of the popular entitlement program by reducing the government's open-ended commitment to seniors, accused Obama of "mis-describing" his proposal and implored the president to ease up on the "demagoguery."

In reply, Obama said he was no stranger to cartoonish depictions, reeling off a list of conservatives' favorite attack points: "I'm the death panel-supporting, socialist, may-not-have-been-born-here president," Obama said, according to people familiar with his remarks.

No word on whether Obama's sentence ended with the words, "so quit whining," but it should've. In fact, it was fearmongering over Medicare that was the Republican strategy to whip up opposition to healthcare reform. The difference between the GOP's take then and Democrats' take now is that the latter is much, much more accurate.

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Paul Ryan Cooks Up Electoral Disaster

Paul Ryan's plan to replace Medicare with a voucher system is bold. It's courageous. It's serious. At least, if you ask various talking heads and pundits -- something you should probably avoid doing. It's one of the great failings of the media that they avoid calling a spade a spade at every opportunity. If some pundit were to tell the truth about the Ryan budget -- what it really does, what it really costs, how necessary it actually is -- this would be "bias." And it would be bias because it would suddenly look very, very bad. TV journalism has now reached a low formerly occupied only by "entertainment news" shows, where they report movies' press packets nearly verbatim and pretend the movie studios aren't writing their "news" for them. Journalists report what people say about a policy proposal and somehow manage to avoid telling you what's in the proposal. Dems hate it, Republicans love it. Let's watch the fight! What's the fight actually about-- who cares?

In these cases, the only people you're going to get the skinny from are those who are paid to be biased -- or, at least, paid to be unafraid to appear biased. In this case, Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman fits the bill.

What I hope regular readers of this blog understand by now is that the Ryan plan is, in fact, a self-serving piece of junk. It doesn't add up -- in fact, it would probably make the deficit bigger not smaller. And far from representing some kind of sacrifice of political interests in the service of the greater good, it’s a right-wing wish-list on steroids: sharp tax cuts for corporations and the rich, savage cuts in aid to the poor, and a gratuitous privatization of Medicare. And again, it's technically incompetent along the way.

So nobility and seriousness had nothing to do with it.

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The GOP's Self-Laid Medicare Trap

The Paul Ryan economic trainwreck budget plan is dead. While not killing it outright, Senate Republican leadership have all but abandoned it. And even if it had ever gotten to the president's desk, it would've been vetoed. The path to survival for Ryan's fantasy-economics porn looks nonexistent and the whole idea exists only as a statement of principle. And that principle isn't being widely embraced by the party.

It may be that Newt Gingrich did Democrats and liberals a tremendous favor by establishing the Ryan plan as a sacred cow. By criticizing it, Newt embarked on what was the worst political week in recent history and set the groundrules for any other Republican campaigns -- the Ryan plan is the most perfect and brilliant piece of legislation ever written and Republican candidates criticize it at their peril.

Which is why Democrats are so eager to make it a campaign issue. Let me correct that; Democrats want to make it the campaign issue. Polling shows that Ryan's plan is about as popular as a fart in an elevator, making it a perplexing hill for House Republicans to choose to die on.

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Paul Ryan's "Messaging Problem"

The problem with Rep. Paul Ryan's budget plan doesn't lie in its obvious flaws, but in the fact that the American public have become aware of its flaws. Things are so bad that Senate GOP aren't even going to address the Medicare "reform," because the whole idea is ballot box poison. The problem there is that, without those reforms, the whole thing is just a plan to increase the deficit.

So Ryan would rather tweak the advertising than fix his product.

The Hill:

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said Wednesday that Republicans are running into a "communications challenge" in selling their 2012 budget proposal to Americans.

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Ryan Plan Flops, Republicans Dither

The Paul Ryan budget plan has so far been a disaster for Republicans. Polling shows that the central idea (what pundits and talking heads call "brave" and "serious") to end Medicaid and Medicare through privatization is extremely unpopular. An ABC News/Washington Post poll finds that 78% oppose privatizing Medicare (with 65% "strongly" opposed) and 59% feel the same about Medicaid. Worse for the GOP, a vast majority of Americans back what Republicans see as sacrilege -- 72% back increasing taxes on households making $250,000 or more annually.

So, with Republicans being your typical finger-in-the-wind types and the prevailing wind direction being so obvious, the solution should be clear, right? Find which way the crowd is marching, then grab a flag and march in front of them. That's "leadership."

Except there's one little problem. According to the report, "Support for raising taxes on the wealthy falls below a majority in only a few groups, e.g., people who call themselves 'very' conservative, conservative Republicans and strong supporters of the Tea Party political movement."

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There's a Reason Why "Compromise" and "Reasonable" are Two Different Words

It's an argument that I bring up often on this blog; that compromise for the sake of compromise is not a good thing, but a bad thing. Especially when that compromise is between two positions at opposites end of a spectrum. If your house has termites, you might call an exterminator. Or you could listen to your crazy Uncle Stan and burn it down. Only burning half your house down does not qualify as a reasonable compromise -- no matter how insistent Stan's arguments are that it's the only solution. A bad idea is a bad idea. Infusing it with a portion of good idea doesn't improve it, it only ruins the good idea. Some compromises should never be made.

In politics, compromises also suffer from a misperception of the center position. There's the Washington middle and the American middle. The Washington middle -- being a town inhabited by a larger than normal proportion of lunatics -- is almost never where the American middle stands. These days, it's far, far to the right. Where Uncle Stan's idea is to burn the house down, the Republican solution would be to burn the house to the ground, then salt the Earth so that nothing ever grows there again. The "compromise" in Washington would be to embrace Uncle Stan's lunacy wholeheartedly.

Of course, I'm just some guy with a blog. No one's going to listen to me, no matter how solid my arguments are. So maybe if someone like Robert Reich were to make the same damned argument...

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Insurance Companies to Paul Ryan: We Don't Want the Medicare Business

The Republican-controlled House will vote on Rep. Paul Ryan's budget plan today, despite the fact that this thing is dead in the water. The support from some House Republicans has been noticeably weak to nonexistent and high-profile Senate GOP are now arguing deficit reduction can't be taken seriously if the party is unwilling to even discuss tax increases.

So bad news all around for the future of Paul Ryan's fantasy-economics porn. Even if it gets past all these hurdles, President Obama will veto it and that'll be the end of it. The votes aren't there to override. It's been fun pointing out how ridiculous this thing is, but it begins the process of dying today.

But that's not going to stop me from piling on. Because Ryan's plan is the perfect expression of principles of today's Republican Party -- socialism in reverse, a seeming disgust with the unemployed and the struggling, and a complete and total misunderstanding of even the most basic economic principles. It isn't a budget proposal, it's a big "screw you!" to the very notion that government should serve the people and a slap in the face of the idea that we're all in this together.

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Reality-Based Budgeting

The budget deficit is a multi-generational problem. At least, that's the impression you get if you listen to some in Washington or pretty much any random talking head. If we don't get crazy with the budget scissors, our children and our grandchildren will pay the price. If we do nothing, the nation will be... I don't know, in flames or something.

But yesterday, Annie Lowrey at Slate crunched the numbers and found the real consequence of doing nothing -- eliminating the budget deficit in eight short years.

So how does doing nothing actually return the budget to health? The answer is that doing nothing allows all kinds of fiscal changes that politicians generally abhor to take effect automatically. First, doing nothing means the Bush tax cuts would expire, as scheduled, at the end of next year. That would cause a moderately progressive tax hike, and one that hits most families, including the middle class. The top marginal rate would rise from 35 percent to 39.6 percent, and some tax benefits for investment income would disappear. Additionally, a patch to keep the alternative minimum tax from hitting 20 million or so families would end. Second, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Obama's health care law, would proceed without getting repealed or defunded. The CBO believes that the plan would bend health care's cost curve downward, wrestling the rate of health care inflation back toward the general rate of inflation. Third, doing nothing would mean that Medicare starts paying doctors low, low rates. Congress would not pass anymore of the regular "doc fixes" that keep reimbursements high. Nothing else happens. Almost magically, everything evens out.

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The Paratrooper President

Barack Obama has a bad habit of cutting congress loose and letting it wander off without leadership. This congress and the previous one have been infested with lunatics, so whatever issue is at the center of the debate of the moment inevitably gets dragged off into crazyland. Then, at the last minute, the president parachutes in and "rescues" the whole thing before it goes completely off the rails. This hasn't worked so well in the past. Healthcare reform, for example, was allowed to drag out for so long and so many lies, so many panic attacks were allowed to attach themselves to it, that the end product was filled with half-measures and managed to disappoint everyone.

Maybe President Obama thinks this makes him seem like the adult in the room and is, therefore, good politics. But history shows it's not. Or maybe this is a case of a former Senator who can't get his head out of the Senate. Whatever the reason, this approach to leadership has served this president very, very poorly.

Maybe it would work in a saner world -- or one with a less lazy press. When Paul Ryan puts out a budget proposal that relies on wishful thinking and numbers from the Heritage Foundation's Institute of Leprechaun Farts and Rainbows, the media calls it "courageous" and pretends the whole thing is serious. Apparently, all you need to do is attack Medicare, shift the tax burden further away from the top wage earners and more toward the bottom, and use numbers pulled out of your butt to justify it, and you're a freakin' hero.

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GOP Bait and Switch on Medicare

In something of a reversal, Republicans in 2009 cast themselves as the protectors of Medicare. President Obama's healthcare reform proposal foresaw savings from Medicare being used more efficiently. Republicans called these cost savings "cuts," began to grandstand on the issue, and prompted the infamous "Government hands off my Medicare!" signs that became a symbol of the Tea Party. Obama was going to slash Medicare and Republicans were out to save it.

Rick Ungar, Forbes, September 2010:

Despite the 'doom and gloom' predictions you may have heard, the proposed savings in Medicare are designed to come from two sources; (a) a crackdown on Medicare fraud, estimated to currently cost the federal government as much as $60 billion per year and (b) a reduction in what is paid to the Medicare Advantage programs offered by private insurance companies.

If you need a simpler explanation, Reuters had it. "There are no cuts to the traditional Medicare benefit," they reported. "The lion's share of spending cuts are in Medicare Advantage -- a program that uses private firms such as Humana and UnitedHealth Group to deliver Medicare benefits."

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Pickpocket Republicans

Yesterday, I wrote about an ad by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Democracy for America supporting workers in Wisconsin against Governor Scott Walker's union busting. At the time, I said it was a good, compelling ad, akin to a documentary film. As of this writing, that ad has generated more that $200,000 to keep it on the air.

Those numbers come from across the nation, as many see the fight in Wisconsin as their own. Americans seem to be tired of watching Republicans grab what the middle class has, then turning around and giving it away to wealthy donors and corporations. Nationally, Republicans push for deep, wounding cuts to everything from PBS to Medicare, but leave giveaways to the wealthy untouched. For example, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives recently voted unanimously to extend tens of billions of dollars in subsidies to big oil, while telling workers that we're broke. This comes after demanding that $36 billion be added to the deficit in order to fund tax cuts for the top 2% of income earners. Every time a taxpayer turns around, he finds a Republican's hand in his pocket and some Wall Street type with their hand out.

That Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid money? That's yours. You paid for it. Likewise PBS, Planned Parenthood, a decent educational system, public highways, etc. All yours. And all being cut -- i.e., taken away from you -- so some oil cartel can keep getting corporate welfare or a handful of paper-shufflers and money resellers can hold on to their tax cut. At the very least, if these programs and institutions absolutely must be sold off, you should get the money. But this isn't the case. From you, to them. And here I thought Republicans were against the redistribution of wealth. Silly me.

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