As If Privatizing Medicare Wasn’t Enough

By Jonathan Cohn for the New Republic – By now, virtually everybody has heard about the Medicare voucher scheme that House Republicans want to implement starting in 2022. Instead of getting comprehensive, government-run insurance, seniors would have to enroll in private insurance, using a federal subsidy too skimpy to pay for adequate coverage. According to…

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Handout on Threats to Medicare, Medicaid

With the help of some single-payer activists in New York City, we created an educational handout explaining how House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s 2012 budget proposal seeks to eliminate Medicare and gut Medicaid. Ryan claims privatizing Medicare and slashing Medicaid funds are necessary to solve the nation’s deficit crisis, but this handout illustrates how Medicare…

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Paul Ryan’s Plan to Destroy Medicare

Editorial from The Nation – As an opening salvo from Republicans in the 2012 budget debate, the plan offered by Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan—supposedly a model of “seriousness” and “courage” next to overzealous Tea Partiers and Democrats silly enough to want to keep the government minimally functional—is remarkable mostly for its cynicism. Consider Ryan’s approach to…

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Republicans dodge downside of Medicaid plan

By David Nather for Politico – Republicans talk a lot about how Medicaid block grants could help governors bring down their costs, but they don’t talk as much about what, exactly, the states would do with them. It’s not that they have no answers. Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi has said he’d like to provide…

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The Budget Battles: The Threat to Medicaid and Medicare

A New York Times Editorial – Representative Paul Ryan’s proposals to reform Medicare and Medicaid are mostly an effort to shift the burden to beneficiaries and the states. They have very little reform in them. Related in Opinion They certainly won’t solve the two most pressing problems in the nation’s health care system: the relentlessly…

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