GOP Rep. Paul Ryan floats a budget proposal for getting rid of the country's massive deficit. All it will take is privatizing Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security:
To move us to surpluses, Ryan's budget proposes reforms that are nothing short of violent. Medicare is privatized. Seniors get a voucher to buy private insurance, and the voucher's growth is far slower than the expected growth of health-care costs. Medicaid is also privatized. The employer tax exclusion is fully eliminated, replaced by a tax credit that grows more slowly than medical costs. And beyond health care, Social Security moves to a system of private accounts...
Something tells me that while people are hopping up and down screaming about deficits right now, they're not going to be jumping on that bandwagon anytime soon. It is, clearly, an effort to move the Overton Window in that direction though, and begin to desensitize Americans to the idea over time.
But Ezra Klein notes an interesting aspect of the proposal. It's not the privatization that saves money - it actually costs more to privatize - it's the federal cost controls that make the difference:
The proposal would shift risk from the federal government to seniors themselves. The money seniors would get to buy their own policies would grow more slowly than their health-care costs, and more slowly than their expected Medicare benefits, which means that they'd need to either cut back on how comprehensive their insurance is or how much health-care they purchase....
This is the government capping its payments and moderating their growth in such a way that many seniors will not get the care they need. This is, in its simplest form, a way to limit the use of a finite resource: Money....
This is, as Ezra points out, rationing pure and simple - rationing health care to a vulnerable group on the basis of their ability to afford decent insurance.
There's actually another and better way to get federal cost controls on Medicare, and the healthcare system as a whole, a way that isn't brutal like the GOP approach and that would actually be wildly politically popular. It's universal single-payer or Medicare For All. With the rest of the population - younger and healthier - mandated to buy into Medicare, and the federal government setting reimbursement rates, costs in the system could be controlled for everyone.
Now that some in the GOP have gone on record as being in favor of federal cost controls in the provisioning of health care, maybe they'll sign on.
How about it, Dems? It's the one solution that will fix the problem, and the only one you haven't yet seriously tried.