Flap’s Links and Comments for May 26th on 14:20

These are my links for May 26th from 14:20 to 15:10:

• Republicans need to ‘man up’ on Medicare reform – Yuval Levin wrote:

  [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.

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  Read it all