Lets say you have a Ford and decide to replace everything under the hood with Hyundai parts, including the engine and transmission. Could you still honestly market your car as a Ford?
That question gets at the heart of the controversy over who is being more forthright about GOP Rep. Paul Ryans plan to save Medicare, Republicans or Democrats.
If you overhaul the Medicare system like you did your Ford and tell the public its still Medicare, are you doing so honestly?
As I noted last week, PolitiFact, the St. Petersburg Times fact checker, decided that the Democrats claim that Ryans plan would mean the end of Medicare was so blatantly untrue it merited designation as the 2011 Lie of the Year. Republicans, whose erroneous claims about health care reform garnered Lie of the Year prizes in 2009 and 2010, cheered. Democrats, as you might imagine, jeered as did some journalists and pundits.
PolitiFacts Washington-based editor defended the choice by contending that Ryans proposal to restructure Medicare by providing beneficiaries subsidies to buy private insurance would not end the program. It would still be Medicare, he reasoned.
What hes missing is that Ryans proposal would change the program so fundamentally as to represent the equivalent of replacing the engine and transmission.
Ryans plan would be a continuation of what Yale professor Jacob Hacker wrote about in his 2006 book, The Great Risk Shift. As Hacker pointed out, big corporations, aided and abetted by their political allies, have been methodically shifting more and more of the risk of providing benefits from them to us.
Ryans plan would accelerate the trend and take it a major step further by gradually shifting much of the financial obligation of paying for benefits from the government to Medicare beneficiaries. Under Ryans blueprint, the government would be doing just what big corporations have been doing for several years now: off-loading risk.
The corporate world started doing this when big banks and multi-line insurance companies with financial services divisions persuaded them to phase out their pension plans and replace them with 401(k)s, so-called because of the section of the federal law that authorized their creation.
In the early part of my fathers career, 401(k)s had not yet been invented. Soon after he was hired as a shift worker at a Tennessee glass factory, he was enrolled in his employers pension plan. When he retired more than 25 years later, he began receiving a predetermined pension benefit every month until he died last December. The payments werent nearly as big as the paycheck he received while on the job, but it was an enormous help financially.
By contrast, when I went to work for CIGNA in 1993, pensions were an endangered species. CIGNA still offered one, but
con't
Healthcare-NOW! - When Medicare Isnt Medicare
That question gets at the heart of the controversy over who is being more forthright about GOP Rep. Paul Ryans plan to save Medicare, Republicans or Democrats.
If you overhaul the Medicare system like you did your Ford and tell the public its still Medicare, are you doing so honestly?
As I noted last week, PolitiFact, the St. Petersburg Times fact checker, decided that the Democrats claim that Ryans plan would mean the end of Medicare was so blatantly untrue it merited designation as the 2011 Lie of the Year. Republicans, whose erroneous claims about health care reform garnered Lie of the Year prizes in 2009 and 2010, cheered. Democrats, as you might imagine, jeered as did some journalists and pundits.
PolitiFacts Washington-based editor defended the choice by contending that Ryans proposal to restructure Medicare by providing beneficiaries subsidies to buy private insurance would not end the program. It would still be Medicare, he reasoned.
What hes missing is that Ryans proposal would change the program so fundamentally as to represent the equivalent of replacing the engine and transmission.
Ryans plan would be a continuation of what Yale professor Jacob Hacker wrote about in his 2006 book, The Great Risk Shift. As Hacker pointed out, big corporations, aided and abetted by their political allies, have been methodically shifting more and more of the risk of providing benefits from them to us.
Ryans plan would accelerate the trend and take it a major step further by gradually shifting much of the financial obligation of paying for benefits from the government to Medicare beneficiaries. Under Ryans blueprint, the government would be doing just what big corporations have been doing for several years now: off-loading risk.
The corporate world started doing this when big banks and multi-line insurance companies with financial services divisions persuaded them to phase out their pension plans and replace them with 401(k)s, so-called because of the section of the federal law that authorized their creation.
In the early part of my fathers career, 401(k)s had not yet been invented. Soon after he was hired as a shift worker at a Tennessee glass factory, he was enrolled in his employers pension plan. When he retired more than 25 years later, he began receiving a predetermined pension benefit every month until he died last December. The payments werent nearly as big as the paycheck he received while on the job, but it was an enormous help financially.
By contrast, when I went to work for CIGNA in 1993, pensions were an endangered species. CIGNA still offered one, but
con't
Healthcare-NOW! - When Medicare Isnt Medicare