SALON

Saturday, Sep 22, 2012 3:00 PM UTC

Romney-Ryan Medicare: No love for students, seniors

Shifting health care costs onto the people who can't afford them breaks a social compact that all Americans rely on

By

Topics: Students, Medicare, Seniors, student loans, Health Care, Next New Deal, Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, 2012 Elections,

Romney-Ryan Medicare: No love for students, seniors (Credit: Reuters/Shannon Stapleton)
This originally appeared on Next New Deal.

With Election Day finally in sight, the last few weeks have been brimming with slogans, speeches, and sound bites. But while Republicans and Democrats are working from a similar playbook, there’s a gaping chasm between their competing visions of the social safety net, and the future of Medicare hangs in the balance. In short, the Republicans claim their voucher plan would reduce health care costs, but the truth is that the seniors who depend on Medicare would be forced to pay the price.

Next New Deal The policy clash boils down to a single notion: vouchers. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are proposing a voucher-based Medicare system—one in which seniors are given vouchers to trade for insurance plans on a national exchange or market. The value of these vouchers is capped at a specific value, with the aim of curbing rising health care costs. And in fact, it is completely true that the Romney-Ryan voucher system will reduce Medicare costs, as promised. But it will do so by pushing those expenses onto Medicare enrollees, by forcing them to pay more out of pocket to cover their medical expenses as health care costs rise. What the GOP is proposing, in other words, is not exactly cost-cutting, but rather cost-shifting from government to seniors. If the yearly national allowance of vouchers has expired and your heart begins to fail, well, at least take solace in the fact that Mr. Ryan’s plan lowers Medicare costs by 20 percent.

If you’re only looking at the arithmetic, voucherizing Medicare is a clear and easy solution to bending the health care cost curve. Unlike, say, prevention and wellness campaigns, it’s not hard to project the level of cuts such vouchers will allow for. But this policy simplicity and straightforwardness mask an equally straightforward truth. Rather than attempt to extract amorphous, messy savings through biomedical innovation, electronic records, waste reduction, comparative effectiveness research, or incentivizing quality of care—in other words, achieving collective savings through progressive reforms—Romney and Ryan propose to gut Medicare and hand senior citizens the entrails. And this is hardly hyperbole; the nonpartisan CBO itself stated that the plan “could lead to reduced access to health care; diminished quality of care for Medicare beneficiaries…[and] less investment in new, high-cost technologies.”

That’s not to say that changes to the structure of Medicare are not needed, or will not require tradeoffs; they will. Real discussions, for instance, will have to be had over such hot-button topics as end-of-life care, or limits on the use of expensive, clinically unproven medical technologies. Refinements to these policies would bring Medicare into the 21st century, making it more nimble and in tune with technological advancement and social change. But they also preserve its central guarantee: that our nation’s retirees, having put in a lifetime of hard work and civic service, will receive quality, affordable health care to support them through their later years.

Fifty years ago, with the creation of Medicare under LBJ, thousands of soon-to-be enrollees—aunts, uncles, professors, my friends’ parents and my own—grew up trusting in this promise. And though, as a student, it will be nearly half a century before I qualify for the program, I recognize all too well the gravity of the decision we now face. It is one, after all, that will be borne most heavily by my peers, since the costs that are shifted to seniors today will be thrust upon us tomorrow as health care costs continue to rise. And young Americans will feel the consequences of voucherization well before we reach the age of eligibility, for the security that Medicare provides allows us to take risks when we’re younger, to try to create the next Facebook or Instagram, rather than play it safe for fear that we’ll be left destitute or denied care in our later years. To chip away at the heart and soul of our social safety net is, in a sense, to hinder innovation itself.

Ultimately, the choice we face is simple: to uphold this mandate or reject it fundamentally; to maintain the promise of health care access for our elderly or begin chipping away at the coverage we provide in the name of budget-balancing. This debate is about a decades-old American social compact, and its effects will reverberate, shaping the futures of not only my own generation but also the ones to come. For the health of our citizens and our safety net, there is only one right answer.

More Rahul Rekhi.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 13 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
Oklahoma senator: Tornado aid “totally different” from Sandy aid
3064 points3065 points | 2381 comments
vote
Anyone Regret Slashing National Weather Service Budget Now?: With GOP-backed cuts to forecasting agency, experts warn future storms will go undetected and more lives lost
1030 points1031 points | 549 comments
vote
Oklahoma senator wants to offset tornado aid with other cuts
155 points156 points | 60 comments
vote
Horrifying new trend: Posting rapes to Facebook " In Chicago this weekend, prosecutors announced three teenaged boys will tried as adults for aggravated criminal sexual assault after allegedly raping a 12-year-old girl — and posting a video of the attack on Facebook."
31 points32 points | 15 comments
vote
New campaign compares gun control to anti-LGBT discrimination
28 points29 points | 11 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations