Yesterday, I wrote about how much money Paul Ryan pockets from the insurance industry–and how the health care part of the industry was going to make out like bandits in the Ryan budget proposal. This is worth digging into a bit more because you can learn very quickly how the Ryan budget truly boils down to a strategy of "throw Momma from the train and let’s enrich the leeches from the health care industry".
My always helpful friends at the Center for Economic and Policy Research give us the data on what the budget proposal would do to Medicare. The bottom line is this:
It gives beneficiaries an $8,000 a year payment in 2022 dollars that does not rise through time. This means that all growth in health care costs after 2022, either due to pure inflation in health care costs above the overall rate of inflation or more services, will be borne completely by the beneficiary.[emphasis added]
And, so, what will happen?:
While the cost will make a Medicare equivalent plan unaffordable to most seniors, even at age 65, many of those who may be able to buy such a plan at age 65 will find that they can no longer afford a comparable plan at age 75 or age 85. Under the Ryan plan only a very small share of older beneficiaries will be able to afford a Medicare equivalent plan.[emphasis added]
That’s the "throw Momma from the bus" piece.
Moving right along to "let’s enrich the leeches from the health care industry" part. In yesterday’s post, I reflected on the absurd idea that Ryan spouts that moving people to a private system "gets rid of waste, increases productivity, and is better for the beneficiary". [more below the fold]
There is ideology and, then, there is ideology that is contrary to THE FACTS–and that foolish statement simply flies in the face of the facts: that Medicare is administered for somewhere around 3 percent of costs, compared to the private industry administrative costs that are pegged at anywhere from 15-25 percent of costs (depending on the assumptions).
But, no matter. Ryan wants to hand over to his campaign contributors an enormous amount of money that they can, then, waste in bloated CEO salaries and bureaucracies that have one goal in mind: to deny people health care. How much money will flow? Using figures from the Congressional Budget Office, CEPR says that by 2020:
…the excess cost in the scenario where everyone buys Medicare equivalent policies is $213 billion. By 2050 the excess cost is projected to rise to $1.2 trillion. It is projected to exceed $3.2 trillion a year by 2080.
"Excess cost" means money that we are going to shell out to the leeches in the insurance industry.
This is the killer point:
The discounted value of excess costs over Medicare’s 75-year planning period is projected to be $20.3 trillion. This is nearly four times the size of the projected Social Security shortfall over the same period.
Get it? All those people, led by Ryan, falsely running around claiming there is some Social Security "crisis" will create a different crisis: Momma will be bankrupted or living without health care.
Don’t forget: there is no debt or deficit crisis. None. Nada. Zilch.
