A piece at The American Thinker today by Jay Schalin entitled "Political Fog Finally Lifts" really lifted my spirits.
So much understanding among the American people has coalesced in the last week. The Left is clearly flailing. The rest of this campaign season will not be about tax returns or subsidized contraception or Mormonism or neo-deconstructionist interpretations of what it means to be black or "queer." It will be about the reasons why we are headed full-tilt toward the cliff's edge. And Paul Ryan will clearly show that it is because we have promised a cornucopia of goodies to various Americans that we could never have made good on.
People of all demographic groups will readily understand this and get behind the team that made it so clear.
It's already having an effect and will continue to do so. What we have to do is be relentless about continuing to get out the message.
Schalin's piece, for all its talk about restoring economic reality in this country is a bit heavy on the social and international policy issues which is where you guys really scare me. You are no different than Obama where you will promise us the world, i.e., by laying off the profit mongers, and give us your preemptivity, rigidity, and, as if we need more prisons, "law and order" (as you define it). There is more mention of "the other," i.e., gays, Muslims, illegals, than your purported cures for what ails us economically, which is really what will get you elected because it is well known that Americans vote their pocketbooks.
ReplyDeleteSo, let's cut to the quick here on Medicare. Since you called me a damn liar in another posting. Here is what Paul Ryan's (and he seems like a real reasonable gentleman, actually, and I can see you howling about him in more time than it took for you to howl about Obama, of course, since the 1st TP Rally occurred less than 3 months after his inauguration and the economy has been his fault since TARP and the GM bail-out, which, as you know, Ryan voted in favor of) budget counterpart says about their differences regarding Medicare:
"The fundamental difference between the approach President Obama and the Democrats have taken and the approach Republicans have taken is this: The president, in Obamacare, worked to reduce health-care costs in the system overall, including in the Medicare system, by, for example, eliminating the huge overpayments going to private insurance in Medicare Advantage and by realigning the payment incentives to reward quality of care over quantity of care. The Republican approach has been to shift rising health care costs onto the backs of seniors. Seniors would get a voucher that declines over time relative to rising health care costs. Seniors get stuck with the bill. And so the president’s approach did not cut any benefits to Medicare beneficiaries. In fact, it strengthened the benefit to individuals with high drug costs, strengthened the preventative benefit under Medicare. In the Ryan budget, they adopted those savings but did not recycle a penny of the savings into benefits."
Read more at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/18/rep-chris-van-hollen-the-romney-ryan-medicare-plan-would-have-immediate-cost-increases-for-seniors/
What say you oh right right rightie?
But, you see, health care costs will fall, not rise, due to the competiton introduced per the Yuval Levin piece I linked to a while back.
ReplyDeletehttp://news.yahoo.com/romney-wants-risky-pick-play-safe-075300266.html
ReplyDeleteRyan reversed course on Thursday and acknowledged lobbying the government for stimulus money after twice denying he had done so. The admission came only after the release of letters, with his signature, asking for millions of the program's dollars on behalf of two companies in his home state. And while he has tried to avoid diving into the specifics of his Medicare plan, a reporter pushed him to explain an apparent contradiction during an impromptu lunch meeting in Ohio. In the interview, Ryan said he never would have included a $700 billion Medicare cut in his budget if Obama hadn't done it first. "He put those cuts there," Ryan said of the president. "We would never have done it in the first place."
"Several previous experiments with privatizing Medicare insurance coverage have ended up raising costs to taxpayers. And on the other side, there is little evidence that moving millions of elderly and disabled patients into commercial health plans will protect their coverage or tame the nation's skyrocketing healthcare tab.
Delete"Doubling down on private insurers is a risky proposition," said University of North Carolina health policy professor Jonathan Oberlander, a leading Medicare historian. "Medicare has lost money on private plans for a long time."
http://www.latimes.com/health/la-na-medicare-20120819,0,7076443.story
Again, I cede the floor to Yuval Levin, this time writing in the Weekely Standard :
ReplyDeleteTheir peculiar decision to focus on the minutiae of Republican policy proposals for addressing the country’s economic and fiscal problems puts the Democrats in the position of highlighting the astonishing irresponsibility of their own plans for the future. President Obama has not only presided over the weakest economic recovery in decades, he is also willing to abide unprecedented deficits going forward, Medicare’s rush toward insolvency and collapse, and an explosion of debt unlike anything America has ever seen, all of which threaten the fiscal future of the government and the economic future of the nation. He offers to do essentially nothing to address any of this, focusing instead on increases in the top two income-tax rates that would barely make a dent in the debt. He has ignored the recommendations of his own fiscal commission, refused to consider any structural reforms of entitlements, and pushed through the creation of yet another health entitlement that looks to be as unsustainable as those we have already.
In essence, Barack Obama is saying to Mitt Romney what Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said to Paul Ryan in a budget committee hearing last winter: “We’re not coming before you today to say we have a definitive solution to that long-term problem. What we do know is we don’t like yours.” Geithner’s declaration of delinquency and failure was not well received, and it is hard to imagine that Obama’s will fare much better.
Speaking of today's columns, Peter Schiff at Thwonhall makes the point that it has to be admitted taht even the Ryan plan for the budget is actually pretty tepid, not achieving balance until 2040. That's because any stronger medicine - i.e., what really has to be done - is not patatable to the American people in thier current mindset.
This all gets back to the freedom to choose. As discussed in an earlier post on this subject, the Ryan plan - and the pro-freedom orientation toward the subject generally - would let seniors - and, remember, we're talking about people who become seniors after the year 2023 - choose private plans that have more features, that is to say, benefits. A lot of Medicare advantage plans already do that, but under the current system, government funds had to pay for those extras. Why not start into the Ryan plan now and let seniors who want something a little more comprehensive - that is, a little less austere - than government-quality health care dip into their own pockets to pay for it if they so choose?
ReplyDelete