The Veep Debate

I didn't see it, I was at a C.E.R.T. class.  And anyway, it seems that historically Vice Presidential Debates Rarely Influence Voters.

 Whatever. But I did enjoy reading this:

 Vice President Jerk: The return of Smirky Malarkey McSmirk

Who knows what the MSM will say tomorrow. I suppose we shall see.

Debate Reveals "Top Things That Make Biden Laugh", viewers reminded of proverbs 29.9

Truely Bipartisan Health Care Reform

Unlike Obamacare, the Wyden-Ryan plan is truely a bipartisan effort, that does not dump any grandma's off a cliff. From Senator Wyden's website:

Bipartisan Health Options

U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and U.S. Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) introduced a new proposal that represents a major advance in the effort to build a more secure future for the millions of seniors who rely on Medicare.

The new report from Sen. Wyden and Rep. Ryan, titled “Guaranteed Choices to Strengthen Medicare and Health Security for All: Bipartisan Options for the Future,” outlines a detailed proposal to offer expanded health care choices for older Americans while preserving a traditional Medicare plan as an option. The report also proposes to give Americans under 65 more power and freedom to purchase insurance products they can carry with them into retirement.

[...]

Why do you say Wyden-Ryan won’t “end Medicare as we know it?”  Won’t allowing seniors to choose private health plans be a major change?

First of all, the hallmark of Medicare is not its structure but its guarantee that every American will have high quality health benefits as they get older.  And, as has been mentioned before, “Medicare as we know it” will end in 2022 if nothing is done to change its current course.  Wyden-Ryan takes action to ensure the Guarantee is preserved.

Contrary to what many believe, every Medicare beneficiary does not currently get their Medicare from the government-administered Medicare insurance plan.  Many seniors are already getting their Medicare from private health insurance plans.  In Oregon, for example, 56 percent of seniors currently get all or some of their health coverage from a private plan. (15 percent of Oregon seniors purchase private Medigap policies to supplement their traditional Medicare, while 41 percent of Oregon's Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled in private health insurance plans through Medicare Advantage.)Wyden-Ryan would allow seniors to continue to choose between the traditional government-administrated Medicare option and privately administered plans.  But instead of maintaining separate programs, Wyden would make those private plans more robust and accountable by forcing them to – for the first time – compete directly with traditional Medicare.

Every private plan that participates in the program would be required to offer health benefits that are AT LEAST as comprehensive as those offered by traditional Medicare and premium support payments would be pegged to the actual cost of health care in a given area, determined by an annual competitive bidding process.  Therefore, every senior – whether they get their health insurance from a private plan or the government – will be guaranteed to have the high quality health benefits that has long been Medicare’s promise.

How will Wyden-Ryan ensure that private insurance companies don’t take advantage of seniors?

All participating private plans will be required to offer benefits that are at least as comprehensive as traditional Medicare, with such standards enforced by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.  Any plan that is found taking advantage of seniors or providing inadequate care will be kicked out of the system. Cherry picking healthier seniors will be made unprofitable by robust risk-adjustment, and the Medicare Exchange where plans will seek to offer coverage to seniors, will be policed by the federal government.

It is worth noting that the Medigap law Senator Wyden authored to regulate the private market for Medicare’s supplemental insurance market has been protecting seniors from unscrupulous insurance practices for more than two decades.

How will Wyden-Ryan guarantee that health care will be affordable for all seniors? Isn’t it just a voucher?

A voucher suggests giving seniors a fixed amount of money indexed by a set rate of growth that may/may not have anything to do with the actual growth of health insurance costs.  Vouchers would not guarantee that seniors could afford health coverage.  (This is what the last year’s House Republican Budget did.)

Wyden-Ryan does not give seniors vouchers.  Instead Wyden-Ryan would guarantee that seniors can afford their health insurance premiums by giving seniors premium support payments, the amount of which will be determined by the actual cost of insurance premiums each year.

It would do this through a competitive bidding process in which private insurance plans, wanting to cover Medicare beneficiaries, would submit their benefit packages and the amount they will charge in premiums for the upcoming year.  The amount seniors receive in premium support will be determined by either the cost of traditional Medicare premiums or the second cheapest private plan available on the exchange (whichever is cheaper.)  This process will take place each year, so if health care costs – and therefore insurance premiums -- grow dramatically from one year to the next, so will the premiums support payments that seniors get to pay for them – thus ensuring that every senior can afford their health insurance premiums.

And again, every private plan in the Medicare exchange will be required to offer benefits that are at least as comprehensive as those offered by traditional Medicare. [...]

It's not a "Radical Plan to Kill Medicare". It actually builds on the Medicare options that already exist, in a way that will both control costs and offer more choices. And it's a plan we can actually afford!

It's definitely worth reading the whole thing. It's pretty much the same Medicare plan that Paul Ryan is advocating on his website.

In an interview for Human Events, Ryan explains the history of bipartisan support for the reforms he's advocating.

   

A Romney-Ryan Ticket? I'd be pleased.

Ryan to be named Romney's running mate

NORFOLK, Va. – Rep. Paul Ryan will be named Mitt Romney's running mate on Saturday, ending weeks of speculation about the No. 2 slot on the GOP ticket.

The Associated Press and several TV networks confirmed the news.

Ryan, 42, is best known as the chairman of the House Budget Committee and author of a dramatic plan to overhaul Medicare, the government-run health insurance program for senior citizens.

Romney is set to reveal his running mate here at a museum next to the U.S.S. Wisconsin, a retired battleship, before setting out on a bus tour of key swing states to highlight his economic plans for the middle class.

In an interview with NBC on Thursday, Romney said he was looking for someone with "a strength of character" and "a vision for the country that adds something to the political discourse about the direction of the country."

With Ryan as his running mate, Romney appears ready to have a national conversation about federal spending and the growth of entitlements with one of the GOP's leading budget authorities at his side.

Ryan, a House member since 1999, has proposed to dramatically change both Medicare and Medicaid, the programs that have been a hallmark of the nation's compact to provide health care to senior citizens and the poor.

[...]

The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial Thursday that choosing Ryan as Romney's running mate would underscore "the nature and stakes of this election."

"More than any other politician, the House Budget Chairman has defined those stakes well as a generational choice about the role of government and whether America will once again become a growth economy or sink into interest-group dominated decline," the Journal editorial said. [...]

I'll still wait for the announcement. I'll be pleased if it's true, but it will be a tough time for Ryan. It will be tough for ANY Republican.
     

Republican complacency. But whose agenda?

Do they need a stronger agenda? Some would argue yes:

Get With the Program

[...] If GOP consultants who are advising the party to avoid embracing a substantive agenda prior to the November elections get their way, this will be the pitiful Republican dance for the next three-and-a-half months.

We understand the Republicans’ temptation to believe that they can beat the Democrats with nothing. The public has recoiled from President Obama’s agenda and seems set to swing to the Republicans as a check against his liberal overreaching. Why not just play it safe and ride the wave that’s already building?

One, this wouldn’t be as safe as it seems. The consultants think Republicans risk putting targets on their backs by associating themselves with particular policy ideas. But Republicans will be targeted regardless. The White House wants to define them as mindless apostles of “No,” and as “Bush Republicans.” Both of these charges could hurt, and they are more likely to stick if Republicans lack a forward-looking agenda of their own.

Two, a campaign agenda is, if nothing else, a sign of seriousness for voters. The danger in the kind of cynical calculation urged by the consultants is always that the public will recognize it for exactly that and react accordingly.

Three, if Republicans plan on having a majority in either house after November, they had better have some idea in advance of how they will conduct themselves in power. If they have an agenda that has won at least loose assent from voters, they’ll be better-off than if they were trying to come up with something on the fly in the flush of victory, when giddiness will rule and special interests will all want a piece of the pie.

Fourth, Republicans should have confidence in their ideas. If they can’t offer an alternative to Obama now — with the president sagging in the polls, with tea partiers in the streets, with conservative sentiment on the upswing across the board in the public — they should be in a different business. This needn’t entail recklessness. The Contract with America of 1994 wasn’t a radical document, but it did point in a clearly different direction than the Clinton Democrats. This is what Republicans need now (watch this space for our ideas) and what House Republicans have been planning on — so long as they don’t flinch. [...]

My fear is though, that the Uber Conservatives are going to push social issues as the spearhead of the party. That would be a mistake.

Spain's economy is collapsing. It's been doing poorly for a while. Conservatives there have not been able to win elections, despite the poor economy. Why? Because their conservative party is dominated by people who wish to push unpopular social issues, that the majority of voters don't agree with. So the economy there continues in it's downward spiral.

Here at home, the Republican's need an agenda, but it must be one that the majority of voters can gather behind. It should be about jobs and the economy, first and foremost.

I don't expect social conservatives to give up their issues, but those issues should not be the spearhead of the party. We need a large tent, with a spearhead that the majority of voters can rally behind.

Swing voters matter. People who are not rigid social conservatives are not RINOS. If social conservatives insist on drumming all who are unlike themselves out of the party, then we will follow the path of Spain. Or worse.

This next election is ours to win or lose. And it may be the last chance to save our Republic.

And for an agenda that many can rally behind, perhaps Paul Ryan's roadmap would be a good place to start:

'Roadmap' a realistic plan to remake the tax system

[...] The Wisconsin Republican's Roadmap is not a "reactionary" document, as the left usually describes most anything that involves substantially reducing the size, scope and cost of government. It doesn't seek to turn back the clock. Rather, it breaks with a strain of libertarian logic that is always at war with the State, while staying true to the idea that the best government is the one that governs least. It advances libertarian ends by admitting the limits of libertarian means.

The key to Ryan's do-over is acknowledging that America will never eradicate the welfare state entirely for the simple reason that Americans don't want to eradicate the welfare state entirely. The Roadmap explicitly declares that the social safety net — in the form of health and retirement benefits — for those "suffering hard times" is something Americans want to keep. On this and other fronts, the document is a monumental concession to political reality. [...]

It may not be perfect, but it doesn't have to be. It only has be good enough for the majority of voters to agree with, and better than the alternative that the current administration is trying to force down our throats. And THAT, it is.

     

Congressman Paul Ryan has Answers

Tax Collecting for Obama’s Welfare State

[...] In theory, it’s possible that Democrats could have passed a health bill that actually made durable reforms in the health entitlement programs that would have improved the medium and long-term budget outlook. But that’s not what they passed. No, new law makes the health entitlement much worse by adding tens of millions of people to Medicaid and a new insurance-subsidy program offered to persons getting insurance in the so-called “exchanges.” CBO expects the cost of these entitlement expansions to reach $216 billion in 2019. Further, the cost would escalate every year thereafter at a very rapid rate, just as Medicare and Medicaid have for more than four decades.

The Democrats respond by saying they also slowed the cost growth in Medicare. But, for starters, their cuts in Medicare do not cover the full cost of their entitlement expansions. That’s why they also raised taxes — by more than a half trillion dollars over ten years. Under the legislation President Obama just signed, federal health entitlement spending goes up, not down. Moreover, the cuts they do impose in Medicare do not in any way constitute “reform” of the program. For the most part, the big savings comes from paying less to hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, and others for the services they provide. In other words, it’s a price-control system.

These kinds of cuts have been passed by Congress many times before. They have never worked to permanently slow the pace of rising costs because they don’t do anything to make the delivery of health services any more efficient than it is today. Over time, arbitrary price controls imposed by the government always drive out willing suppliers of services and lead to access problems. That’s not entitlement reform. It’s government-enforced rationing of care.

To slow the pace of rising costs without harming the quality of American medicine will require restructuring the tax code and entitlement programs to promote a vibrant marketplace in the health sector, with strong price competition and consumer choice. That’s the vision Congressman Paul Ryan has laid out. And it’s both genuine health reform and entitlement reform too. [...]

Indeed! Here is a link to Ryan's website, where you can learn all the details:

A Roadmap for America's Future

Congressman Ryan is one of the best things the GOP has to offer right now:

Paul Ryan - a man to watch #12

He has answers and ideas that can actually work.