In his press conference on Monday morning, President Barack Obama repeatedly insisted that he was willing to tackle some sacred cows as part of a larger package to raise the debt ceiling. Just how sacred, however, may surprise political observers.
According to five separate sources with knowledge of negotiations — including both Republicans and Democrats — the president offered an increase in the eligibility age for Medicare, from 65 to 67, in exchange for Republican movement on increasing tax revenues.
The proposal, as discussed, would not go into effect immediately, but rather would be implemented down the road (likely in 2013). The age at which people would be eligible for Medicare benefits would be raised incrementally, not in one fell swoop.
Sources offered varied accounts regarding the seriousness with which the president had discussed raising the Medicare eligibility age. As the White House is fond of saying, nothing is agreed to until everything is agreed to. And with Republicans having turned down a “grand” deal on the debt ceiling — which would have included $3 trillion in spending cuts, including entitlement reforms, in exchange for up to $1 trillion in revenues — it is unclear whether the proposal remains alive.
These are my links for July 5th from 12:09 to 12:12:
Double Standards at MSNBC – So here we are in a brand new week and Mark Halperin, a senior political analyst at Time magazine and a regular contributor on MSNBC, is still suspended for calling President Obama a “di**” on Morning Joe.
Never mind that Halperin thought he was on a seven-second delay and that his remark would never be heard by the public. Never mind, too, that he immediately apologized, on the air. The White House press secretary called MSNBC to complain and, poof, Halperin was gone. Suspended indefinitely.
MSNBC issued a statement saying, “Mark Halperin’s comments this morning were completely inappropriate and unacceptable. We apologize to the President, The White House, and all of our viewers. We strive for a high level of discourse and comments like these have no place on our air.”
Really? When did MSNBC start to care about what is and what is not appropriate when it comes to commenting on a sitting president of the United States? And when did the network start to strive for a high level of discourse?
I offer up two words to show how self-serving and disingenuous the MSNBC statement is: Keith. Olbermann.
Perhaps the MSNBC suits missed the show when Olbermann, talking about then-President Bush, said, “You’re a fascist! Get them to print you a T-shirt with ‘fascist’ on it!”
Maybe they also missed the one when Olbermann said President Bush was guilty of “murderous deceit” and then, working himself up into a frenzy, looked into the camera and yelled at the president to “shut the hell up.”
Or how about the time this popped up on the screen while Olbermann was ranting about President Bush: “Pathological presidential liar or an idiot in chief?”
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But, it was Booooosh…..
Entitlement Bandits – Medicare and Medicaid Fraud – The budget blueprint crafted by Paul Ryan, passed by the House of Representatives, and voted down by the Senate would essentially give Medicare enrollees a voucher to purchase private coverage, and would change the federal government’s contribution to each state’s Medicaid program from an unlimited “matching” grant to a fixed “block” grant. These reforms deserve to come back from defeat, because the only alternatives for saving Medicare or Medicaid would either dramatically raise tax rates or have the government ration care to the elderly and disabled. What may be less widely appreciated, however, is that the Ryan proposal is our only hope of reducing the crushing levels of fraud in Medicare and Medicaid.
The three most salient characteristics of Medicare and Medicaid fraud are: It’s brazen, it’s ubiquitous, and it’s other people’s money, so nobody cares.
Mediscare—The Surprising Truth – The Obama administration has repeatedly claimed that the health-reform bill it passed last year improved Medicare's finances. Although you'd never know it from the current state of the Medicare debate—with the Republicans being portrayed as the Medicare Grinches—the claim is true only because ObamaCare explicitly commits to cutting health-care spending for the elderly and the disabled in future years.
Yet almost no one familiar with the numbers thinks that the planned brute-force cuts in Medicare spending are politically feasible. Last August, the Office of the Medicare Actuary predicted that Medicare will be paying doctors less than what Medicaid pays by the end of this decade and, by then, one in seven hospitals will have to leave the Medicare system.
Dick explains that we don’t need to cut Medicare to cut the deficit and warns that Republicans must heed the lesson of our NY Congressional defeat and back off Ryan’s Medicare cuts.
[T]he new Medicare Trustees report says the program is five years closer to bankruptcy than it seemed to be last year: Its trust fund will run out of money in 2024. But the real shocker in this year’s report is a letter that the chief actuary of Medicare attached to the very end of the report, basically saying that things are much worse than the trustees suggest. The letter (which starts on page 265 of the document and pretty much makes the prior 264 pages moot) first says that the trustees were compelled to adopt some near-term assumptions that are highly implausible.. . .
Then it says that Obamacare, because it calls for across-the-board cuts in Medicare funding but does not put in place the market mechanisms for encouraging greater productivity in health care, spells disaster for Medicare providers, and therefore for Medicare recipients
In other words, as Yuval put it, the message for Republicans (whether they embrace Ryan’s plan or not) is: “Medicare as we know it is on the fast lane to ruin. It’s not the House Republican Budget that is undoing it, it’s the current structure of the program, exacerbated by Obamacare. House Republicans have proposed one way to fix it, which would also help reduce health-care costs more broadly. Surely there are also other ways, but the Democrats haven’t offered any.”
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The GOP needs to go on offense.
IPAB, Obama, and Socialism – They’re back. Rationing, death panels, socialism, all those nasty old words that helped bring Republicans victory in 2010, and that came to seem so impolite after November of that year. They’re back because of IPAB. Remember that acronym. It stand for The Independent Payment Advisory Board. IPAB is the real death panel, the true seat of rationing, and the royal road to health-care socialism. President Obama won’t admit to any of that, but his speech in response to Paul Ryan’s plan did push IPAB out of the shadows and into public view, however briefly. If Republicans don’t seize the IPAB issue and run with it, they’ll be losers in 2012. Policy wonks and political junkies may know a bit about this health-care rationing panel, but most Americans have barely heard of it. That has got to change. And the only way to expose and explain the dangers of IPAB is to tell the truth about Barack Obama.
In his speech on the deficit, Obama pointed to IPAB as an answer to Paul Ryan’s plan. In Ryan’s vision, competition among insurers will force efficiencies and lower prices. Under Obama’s plan, in contrast, health-care prices for the elderly would be controlled by IPAB. Ryan’s plan puts consumers in the driver’s seat, but also exposes them to the risk of bad choices and limited subsidies. While Obama’s plan offers government-guaranteed care, IPAB’s price controls will lead to one-size-fits-all rationing. As IPAB caps Medicare payments for various services, the elderly will be unable to obtain many kinds of care, or will experience de facto rationing via long treatment delays and sharp declines in the quality of care. And by the way, IPAB rationing will hit many current seniors, whereas Ryan’s reform of Medicare will never affect anyone now 55 or older.
These are my links for May 25th from 18:08 to 18:28:
OBAMA’S MEDICARE HYPOCRISY – Piously posturing as the savior of Medicare, President Obama lashed out at the House Republicans for embracing the budget proposed by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). But a comparison of the president’s own plans for Medicare with those in the Ryan budget shows that the Democratic cuts are far more immediate and drastic than anything in the GOP proposal.
While the Republican Medicare changes only take effect in 2021, Obama’s cuts will begin hurting seniors right away. The president’s healthcare legislation imposed a hard spending cap on Medicare ?– the first time it has ever had one — which he has just proposed lowering by another one-half of 1 percent of GDP (a further cut of about $70 billion a year).
Obama’s cuts, which will take effect immediately, are to be administered by his newly created Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) of 15 members appointed by the president. Its recommendations for cuts in Medicare services or for reductions in reimbursement will not be subject to congressional approval but will take effect by administrative fiat. Right now.
The IPAB will be, essentially, the rationing board that will decide who gets what care. Its decisions will be guided by a particularly vicious concept of Quality Adjusted Life Years (QUALYS). If you have enough QUALYS ahead of you, you’ll be approved for a hip replacement or a heart transplant. If not, you’re out of luck. Perforce, many of these cuts will fall on those at the end of their lives, reducing their options to accommodate Obama’s mandate to cut costs. If death comes sooner, well, that’s the price of aging in Obama’s America.
Ryan’s approach is totally different.
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Read it all
NEWT’S RIGHTabout Ryan’s Medicare Cuts – In the 1980s, the pre-Blair leftist Labor Party issued its campaign manifesto to oppose Thatcher’s Conservatives in the coming national election. Its loony, leftist proposals were so extreme that the Tory media promptly dubbed it “the longest suicide note in history.”
The Republican proposal to shift Medicare from the current system to a voucher-based program of private insurance – in TEN years – falls into the same category. Don’t blame Newt Gingrich for saying so. In fact, we have to hope that Romney, Bachmann, Daniels and the other candidates join him in distancing himself from the plan if we have a hope of electing any of them president!
Worse, the Ryan budget continues the $500 billion in Medicare cuts which formed the basis of the Republican critique of Pelosi and Obama in the 2010 election. It keeps the money in the Medicare system rather than spending it on other entitlements as Obama did, but that is scant compensation for someone seeking care now to stay alive!
(When I first endorsed Ryan’s plan in a column and video, I was under the impression – as he had told me – that he would eliminate the $500 billion cut. I must have misunderstood him because his plan keeps that very cut on which we based our entire 2012 campaign. When I found that out, I switched to opposing his plan).
Paul Ryan: 2012’s Goldwater? – I used to worry that Sarah Palin would be the Barry Goldwater of 2012. My bad. Paul Ryan is the Barry Goldwater of 2012.
The Goldwater effect continues on this morning after the NY-26 debacle. Henry Olsen of AEI, as smart a political numbers guy as can be found on the political right, crunches the numbers to compare the performance of the 2011 special election candidates with the district-wide performance of all other GOP and Democratic candidates in 2010. He finds:
Republican congressional candidate Jane Corwin is running 18 points behind the worst-performing Republican of 2010
Democrat Kathy Hochul is running even with Barack Obama’s performance in the district in 2008 – the best Democratic showing in NY-26 in three decades.
The Republicans suffered their worst losses in the least-educated portions of the District, where former GOP voters seem to have deserted the party for an independent candidate, Jack Davis.
What should make this race all the more alarming for Republicans is that NY-26 turned into a referendum on the Ryan plan for Medicare. As Henry Olsen says:
blue-collar voters react differently to issues than the GOP base does. They are more supportive of safety-net programs at the same time as they are strongly opposed to large government programs in general. These voters crave stability and are uncertain of their ability to compete in a globalized economy that values higher education more each year. They are also susceptible to the age-old Democratic argument that the secret Republican agenda is to eviscerate middle-class entitlements to fund tax cuts for the wealthy.
The Ryan budget is uniquely vulnerable to that attack because it fuses very tough Medicare reforms with big tax cuts in the same document.
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Read it all.
Frum is right in part and the GOP should not in lockstep endorse the entirety of the Paul Ryan Budget Plan.
But ABC News was behind the scenes with the Wisconsin Congressman and GOP Budget Committee Chairman when he got some words of encouragement none other than former President Bill Clinton.
"So anyway, I told them before you got here, I said I’m glad we won this race in New York," Clinton told Ryan, when the two met backstage at a forum on the national debt held by the Pete Peterson Foundation. But he added, “I hope Democrats don't use this as an excuse to do nothing.”
Ryan told Clinton he fears that now nothing will get done in Washington.
“My guess is it’s going to sink into paralysis is what’s going to happen. And you know the math. It’s just, I mean, we knew we were putting ourselves out there. You gotta start this. You gotta get out there. You gotta get this thing moving,” Ryan said.
Clinton told Ryan that if he ever wanted to talk about it, he should “give me a call.” Ryan said he would.
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Better start the discussion because the numbers will become real soon enough.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) joined four other Republican senators who'd previously announced their opposition to the budget, which has sustained withering criticism by Democrats who say it would end Medicare as Americans currently know it.
Sens. Scott Brown (R-Mass.), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) voted against it as they'd previously said they would, largely because of the reforms contained within the budget to Medicare, transforming it into a voucher-based system for Americans under the age of 55.
Also as expected, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) voted against the plan because he views it as not going far enough.
The budget, crafted by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), had been the subject of scrutiny from Democrats, who credited its Medicare provision for a victory on Tuesday night in a special election to an upstate New York congressional district.
The underlying bill failed in a 40-57 vote, with 60 votes being needed to bring up the Ryan budget for debate. Two Republican senators did not vote.
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