Epsilon Delta
Jedi Master
Interesting article about the deficit, the GOP health care plan, and the media:
What we're not being told about Paul Ryan's Medicare plan | Dean Baker | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
What we're not being told about Paul Ryan's Medicare plan | Dean Baker | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
Dean Baker said:Unfortunately the Washington policy gang is busy following Claude Rains instructions. The nation is drowning in endless accounts of how the huge deficit will sink the economy and the country. These accounts invariably feature stories of a Congress addicted to spending and a nation that wants government benefits that it doesnt want to pay for.
This story has nothing to do with reality as all budget analysts know. The explosion of the budget deficit in the last three years is a response to the plunge in private sector demand following the collapse of the housing bubble. If the budget deficit were smaller, we would simply have less demand and fewer jobs.
Paul Ryan did his best to lay out the long-term story as clearly as possible with his plan to privatize Medicare. The analysis by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) shows that Ryans plan would hugely increase the cost of health care to seniors. Under the Ryan plan a Medicare equivalent policy is projected to cost almost half of a median 65-year old retirees income by 2030. It would soon exceed the income of most retirees as health care costs outpace income growth.
However most of the additional burden projected for retirees is not the result of cost shifting from the government. The vast majority of the additional burden that the CBO projected for retirees comes from the higher cost of private insurance compared with the government-run Medicare system. The additional cost as a result of adopting Ryans privatized system is more than $30 trillion over Medicares 75-year planning horizon.
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However it seems that no budget reporters not a single reporter at the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal or any other major news outlet picked up on this central point in the analysis from the CBO. Instead they talked about the plan as a question of whether people preferred a government guarantee or would rather have individuals rely on themselves and the market to obtain health care in their old age. The $30 trillion price tag in the form of added waste was altogether missing in the reporting.
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Similarly, there was almost no reporting on the $8 trillion housing bubble, the collapse of which has given us the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Instead we were given the assurance from Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and the rest that everything was OK. Instead the news outlets told us to worry about the budget deficit back when it was just 1.0 percent of GDP.
Incredible as it may seem, the national press corps is almost completely ignoring a report from the governments main source of budget projections. Rather than telling people that the Ryan plan to privatize Medicare means transferring tens of trillions of dollars from taxpayers and Medicare beneficiaries to private insurers and the health care industry, they spread drivel about the issue being a matter of whether people like the government or the market.