#couponcare

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Speaker Ryan was on Hugh Hewitt recently and talked about his plans to target earned benefits in 2018. Here, Ryan mentions turning Medicare into a voucher or CouponCare.

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Perhaps the most striking element of Ryan’s proposal was its call to reinvent Medicare, the wildly popular program for the elderly that politicians attack at their own peril.

Ryan promised not to alter the program for people currently on it or within 10 years of eligibility. But he proposed to treat future beneficiaries differently, providing them with a voucher for private insurance rather than a guarantee of benefits. Over time, the voucher would lose value relative to health care costs, experts predicted, so that seniors would be increasingly responsible for their own medical bills.

After Ryan released a slightly revised version of the budget one year later, Robert Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, called it “a remarkable document — one that, for most of the past half-century, would have been outside the bounds of mainstream discussion due to its extreme nature.”

If enacted, Greenstein warned, it would produce “the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history,”

via Huffington Post.

Related Reading:

Farewell to Paul Ryan and His Insidious "Entitlement Reforms."

As America’s Privatizer-in-Chief, he spearheaded attempts to turn Medicare into a voucher program and to gamble retirees’ Social Security benefits on the whims of Wall Street.

He passed legislation in the House to cut more than $1 trillion from Medicaid by imposing per capita caps and turning it into a block grant program.

If the Senate had passed it, too, millions of low income Americans would have lost health coverage, according to projections by the Congressional Budget Office.

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A request for public comment from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has caught the eye of a group of Democratic Senators, alarmed about its implications for the future of Medicare.

In February, 15 Senators sent a letter to CMS Administrator Seema Verma expressing concern over a Fall, 2017 Request for Information (RFI) regarding a “new direction” for Medicare’s Innovation Center — and the agency’s subsequent failure to make public the more than 1,000 comments it received.

At the heart of the Senator’s concerns is ambiguous language in the RFI that suggests a shift toward converting Medicare into a voucher program, which would, “fundamentally restructure the guaranteed benefit traditional Medicare provides to older adults and people with disabilities.” 

“We applaud your efforts to seek input on the Innovation Center’s work,” write the Senators, “However, we are alarmed that you opted to solicit input on such an ambiguous concept.”

In other words, if CMS is truly considering a “premium support” or voucher model, CMS should have made that abundantly clear in the RFI so that Congress and “diverse stakeholders” could comment appropriately.

Read more from this op-ed by clicking here.

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On Tuesday, House Republicans released a 2018 budget plan that would make cuts to Medicare and Social Security, despite President Trump’s campaign pledge to keep those entitlement programs intact.

The proposal calls for more than $200 billion in cuts to mandatory programs. It also serves “as a vehicle for changing taxes,” CNN reports, which is “the primary legislative focus of the 2018 budget.”

via The Atlantic.

House GOP Recklessly Pursues Privatization of Medicare in Budget Process.

Congress is targeting the health and financial well-being of America’s seniors by making yet another attempt to privatize Medicare. Today the House Budget Committee is marking up the GOP’s FY 2018 budget resolution, which includes Speaker Paul Ryan’s “Medicare premium support” scheme – an innocuous name for turning time-tested senior health care coverage into “Coupon-Care.”

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House GOP Recklessly Pursues Privatization of Medicare in Budget Process

The House budget blueprint slashes nearly $500 billion from Medicare over ten years and raises the eligibility age from 65 to 67 – along with gutting Medicaid and other social safety net programs for needy seniors.  

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House GOP Recklessly Pursues Privatization of Medicare in Budget Process.

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The Trump administration is signaling it will pursue significant changes to Medicare that could put beneficiaries on the hook for higher costs.

In an informal proposal on Wednesday, federal health officials hinted at several new pilot programs it may implement in the months ahead. One idea would give doctors more latitude to enter into so-called private contracts to charge Medicare beneficiaries more for certain services, if the patients were willing to pay. Elsewhere in the document, officials indicated they might offer more incentives to encourage beneficiaries to join private Medicare plans, known as Medicare Advantage plans. Democrats and other experts said the language suggested interest in the controversial “premium support” model long favored by Republican policymakers.

via PBS.

Related Reading:

House Leadership Recklessly Pursues Privatization of Medicare in Budget Process.

“Over time, giving seniors vouchers to purchase health insurance would dramatically increase their out of pocket costs since the fixed amount of the voucher is unlikely to keep up with the rising costs of health care.”

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Make no mistake: recent developments on the Hill should provide seniors with some sense of relief about the future of the programs they depend upon. But, as with an approaching storm whose course keeps changing, any sense of relief can only be temporary. Congressional conservatives’ attempts to gut Medicaid, privatize Medicare, and cut programs that benefit older Americans have been slowed, but not stopped.

Read more from this article via The Hill.