Three Ways To Save Medicare Paul Ryan Doesn?t Want You To Know About
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on May 1st, 2011 4:35 am by HL
Three Ways To Save Medicare Paul Ryan Doesn?t Want You To Know About
Across the country, Main Street Americans are speaking out against a GOP budget plan that would effectively end Medicare.
In taking aim at Medicare, these conservative members of Congress are claiming that they are actually “saving Medicare” from financial ruin and that there is no possible choice other than to privatize the program and throw seniors to the insurance industry. They say this to justify a plan that the Congressional Budget Office says would have the elderly spending the majority of their income on health care.
Yet what Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) — the architect of the plan to end Medicare — and other right-wingers don’t want you to know is that there are actually numerous way to shore up the fiscal solvency of Medicare that wouldn’t involve such a dangerous privatization scheme.
ThinkProgress has assembled three different policy options that, if enacted, could help Medicare’s future financial issues and save the taxpayer billions of dollars:
1. Empower Medicare To Negotiate For Lower Drug Prices: One policy option that would be very simple to enact and would not require any sort of increased spending or expansion of government would be to simply allow Medicare to use its bulk purchasing power to negotiate with drugmakers for lower prices. The program is currently banned from doing so, thanks to the clout of the drug industry. Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) estimates that doing this could save as much as $156 billion over 10 years.
2. Allow Drug Reimportation From Canada: One of the major costs in the U.S. health care system that drives up the costs not only in the private sector but also among Medicare are the costs of prescription drugs. One very easy was to greatly relieve this cost is to eliminate protectionist barriers and allow the free importation of prescription drugs from our neighbors like Canada. A failed measure proposed by Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and John McCain (R-AZ) to do exactly that in 2009 estimated that doing so would save consumers $80 billion over ten years.
3. Globalize Medicare: Another protectionist barrier and detriment to free trade in the U.S. health care system is that seniors currently aren’t allowed to use their Medicare insurance system outside of the United States. An alternative to this would be to drop these trade barriers and allow seniors on Medicare to seek care abroad, where services are much cheaper. Economist Dean Baker estimates that if fifty percent of Medicare beneficiaries opted for this globalized option, then taxpayers would save more than $40 billion a year by 2020. President Obama Rep. Rehberg, Whose Net Worth Is $31 Million, Says He?s ?Cash Poor? And ?Struggling?
As ThinkProgress has been reporting, conservative members of Congress are facing a backlash across the country as Main Street Americans, outraged by a GOP budget that effectively ends Medicare, speak out.
At a town hall earlier this week in Montana, Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-MT) began comparing the plight of every day middle class Americans like those at his town hall with his own economic circumstance. He droned on about how he’s ‘struggling’ as a small businessman. A constituent asked him what his own net worth is and he said he’s “land rich and cash poor”:
REHBERG: I’m a small businessman. My wife is a small businessman. She hasn’t taken a salary in ten years as a result of business. We’re struggling like everyone else. With the ecnoomy.
CONSTITUENT: What’s your salary?
REHBERG: I’m land-rich and cash-poor. Like ranchers and farmers and small businessmen throughout Montana. […]
Watch it, via MontanaDemocrats:
While Rehberg calls himself poor and complains that he’s struggling, the fact is that he is, as of 2009 records, the 14th richest member of the House of Representatives. Opensecrets.org estimates that his average net worth in 2009 was $31 million. If he’s struggling on that, one has to wonder if he’s really a good arbiter of what’s fair for Main Street America.
