Ryan Calling The Kettle Black With Medicare Scare Tactics

September 18th, 2012
Robyn Blumner

Ryan’s budget blueprint, the one passed by the House in March, is a manifesto of government-rationed care, a modern-day Magna Carta Libertatum to Ryan’s philosophy that freeing Americans from debilitating government aid is the only way their productive potential will be fully realized. Ryan introduced it by saying he doesn’t want America’s safety net programs to become “a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.”

Ryan’s freedom agenda includes “vouchercare” through which Americans who become Medicare-eligible in 10 years would have the freedom to hunt for private health insurance with a rationed voucher that inevitably won’t keep up with medical inflation.

For middle-class seniors needing a nursing home placement paid for by Medicaid, Ryan gives them the freedom to cover the average $80,000 annual price tag or find some other living arrangement, by transforming Medicaid’s open-ended guarantees into a rationed block grant to the states and cutting funds 35 percent by 2022.

Poor families would have the freedom to either find decent paying jobs or go hungry, since their access to food stamps would be rationed. Ryan would block grant that program, too, and institute a time limit.

The man has taken as an injunction Janis Joplin’s famous lyric that “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Where FDR would grant us freedom from want, Ryan gives us freedom from help. But at least there will be no “unaccountable bureaucrats” subverting Medicare; Ryan will have already done that job for them.

http://www.nationalmemo.com/ryan-calling-the-kettle-black-with-medicare-scare-tactics/