One day as a 16 year old, Ryan came upon the lifeless body of his father. Paul Ryan, Sr. had died of a heart attack at age 55, leaving the Janesville Craig High School 10th grader, his three older brothers and sisters and his mother alone. It was Paul who told the family of his father’s death.
With his father’s passing, young Paul collected Social Security benefits until age 18, which he put away for college. To make ends meet, Paul’s mother returned to school to study interior design. His siblings were off at college. Ryan remembers this difficult time bringing him and his mother closer.
Within months, Paul’s maternal grandmother moved into the house. She suffered from Alzheimer’s, and it often fell on young Paul to care for her, including brushing and braiding her hair. Ryan credits his father’s death and the care of his grandmother as giving him first-hand experience as to how social service programs work...
Ryan’s critics have been hammering at a provision of his Roadmap that would fundamentally alter Medicare by injecting market forces into the program. Ryan would provide individuals under the age of 55 with a voucher worth $11,000 per year when fully phased in. The voucher would then be indexed to inflation and be increased for those with lower incomes.
White House budget director Peter Orszag, while acknowledging Ryan’s plan would address the nation’s long-term fiscal problem, argues that health care costs will rise faster than the value of the voucher. Saying Ryan’s plan only saves money by “shifting a lot of the risk and expected cost onto individuals and their families,” Orszag believes too many policymakers—Republicans as well as Democrats--will find that solution objectionable.
Ryan calls this the most “fair and accurate” criticism of his plan, but says that it’s impossible to keep funding health care expenditures at the current rate of increase. He says the Obama plan deals with the problem by rationing care. “My plan gives individuals control to put market pressure on providers to compete,” he says.
20 April 2011
Paul Ryan and Medicare
Excerpts from a July 2010 article in Wisconsin Interest:
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Current consumer choice of private healthcare insurance plans has done sooooo much to reign in costs, hasn't it?
ReplyDeleteRyan would rather let the insurance companies do the rationing. Yeah, I mean, we can really trust them, right?
ReplyDeleteThere are so many things wrong with his plan, it's ridiculous.
We pay roughly twice as much for our health care as other developed nations, and it's not that much better, if at all. The solution isn't to make poor and old people pay more for their care, it's to figure out how to make health care less expensive for everybody. If other countries can do it, why can't we?
--Swift Loris
Another point about the Ryan plan that was mentioned on a recent Real Time is the question is "if you are really sick, like so many elderly are, and you blow through that allotment early in the year, what happens then? If you blow though $11,000 in two months, what do you do for the rest of the 10 months of that year?
ReplyDeleteAnd Ayn Rand was swift and happy to pocket every government $ she could grab when she was fighting the big C...
ReplyDelete@DaBris--the Ryan vouchers are to pay for private health insurance, not health care per se, as I understand it, so once you've purchased your insurance with the voucher, there's nothing to be blown through. The insurance company will be paying the doctors and hospitals.
ReplyDeleteCo-pays and deductibles, and anything above the annual maximum benefit allowed by your plan, will come right out of your pocket, though; the vouchers won't help with those.
(Somebody please correct me if I have this wrong.)
--Swift Loris
Let's talk rationing for a minute. For many old people, the last year of their lives eats up more money than all the eighty-some years that went before. Why do we spend so muchmoney trying to keep old people alive? I am almost 70, and made my living will years ago. No extraordinary measures, do not resuscitate, with strong instructions to my children to pull the plug.
ReplyDeleteNor should we spend huge amounts of money trying to keep babies born without vital parts alive.
We, as a society, need to become more realistic about health care in general. Just because vry expensive treatments exist, it doesn't mean they always have to be employed. Let's be sensible.
Swift, you are right.
ReplyDeleteAnd Barb, I think most educated people would agree with you.
@Barbwire--I agree totally. I'm exactly your age, and I've done the same thing.
ReplyDeleteBut it really has to be an individual decision, I think. It's one thing to promote the idea, and quite another to enforce it.
--Swift Loris
If you want to know why we pay twice as much as the Europeans for health care for worse outcomes it's because the government and private health insurers are writing blank checks to the medical establishment. If you have 50,000,000 people who only have $11,000 a year to spend on health insurance, guess what, someone will find a way to make that work - hint, it will involve less money for the medical establishment. The alternative is that the doctors, nurses, drug and medical device makers will control 50% of the economy in the near future.
ReplyDeleteSince Obamacare was signed into law, insurance premiums have gone up by $2500 to $3000 per year. It's a bad law. Taxing the sale of medical devices and supplies is grossly unfair to patients, and rationing care for the very young and the elderly is criminal. At 70, I have a living will and left instructions for DNR and much more (to do much less), but EMS personnel ignore it.
ReplyDelete