Counter the Medicare Lies

Strangely, Americans do not seem to be rushing to embrace the repug plan to kill Medicare. Indeed, they seem to be rushing to reject everyone associated with the terminally toxic "Ryan Plan."

So the repugs are ramping up the lies - and the projection.

Steve Benen:

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) sure sounds defensive (and incoherent), doesn’t he? “Here’s the deal on our Medicare plan: ObamaCare ends Medicare as we know it,” he said today.

As Steve wrote in June when this lie first started:

First, the Affordable Care Act doesn’t “end Medicare as we know it.” That’s deeply stupid. The ACA eliminated a wasteful and unnecessary giveaway to insurance companies, and as Igor Volsky explained, the law “reduced annual increases in payments to hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, home health agencies and other institutions to spur productivity and cut overpayments to private insurers that are not delivering value for Medicare dollars. It used that money to expand coverage to 32 million Americans — many of whom were receiving uncompensated care at these institutions — to extend the life of the Medicare program and invest in new demonstration projects that aim to encourage providers to deliver quality care more efficiently.”

And also:

As for the substance behind the claim, it’s worth noting that this isn’t just about semantics — the GOP claim that their scheme doesn’t include vouchers is just wrong. Paul Krugman explained:

[T]he ACA is specifically designed to ensure that insurance is affordable, whereas Ryancare just hands out vouchers and washes its hands. Specifically, the ACA subsidy system (pdf) sets a maximum percentage of income that families are expected to pay for insurance, on a sliding scale that rises with income. To the extent that the actual cost of a minimum acceptable policy exceeds that percentage of income, subsidies make up the difference.

Ryancare, by contrast, provides a fixed sum — end of story. And because this fixed sum would not grow with rising health care costs, it’s almost guaranteed to fall far short of the actual cost of insurance.

This is also why Ryancare is NOT premium support; it’s a voucher system. No matter how much they say it isn’t, that’s exactly what it is.

Today Steve also notes:

Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, premiums for Americans with pre-existing conditions are shrinking.

No, the ACA is no cure for what ails our failing health care system. But it's a few orders of magnitude better than the economic faith healing the repugs are pushing.