More Ryan Coverage
NPR’s All Things Considered decided to look at Paul Ryan’s budget proposal [transcript and audio link] and invited Paul Krugman and Douglas Holtz-Eakin to review it.
To say that Krugman was dismissive is perhaps understating what happened.
On a related note regarding Ryan’s $8,000 voucher for an individual to purchase health care insurance, an acquaintance just went on Medicare, and his company’s HR department had a party. It turns out that with the company picking up the cost of the “Medigap” insurance and the other costs of Medicare, they still save over $1,000/month. This individual’s group insurance at the small company he works for costs well in excess of $1K/per month and Ryan thinks people will be able to buy a reasonable individual policy for $8K/year in ten-years time.
3 comments
$8000? does he mean $8000 per year? Heh. What a joker Ryan is. He should find a gig as a stand-up comic. That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard all day. [/snark]
Before I dropped my very ordinary, non-luxurious private med insurance policy about three years ago, Blue Cross had just raised my rate to about $2000 A MONTH. Paul Ryan lives in a fantasy world, and wants to compel us to live there, too.
One wonders if there are unicorns in that fantasy world where Paul Ryan lives. And cotton candy trees. One cannot forget cotton candy trees.
In *this* reality, over 60% of the elderly had no health insurance when Medicare was passed, and Medicare passed as a single-payer plan because insurers wouldn’t sell health insurance to the elderly for *any* price because (duh) old people get SICK and it’s impossible to collect enough money from old people to pay those costs of getting sick. Half of the costs of health care are eaten up by that 12.8% of old people, and there simply is no way to collect sufficient money as health insurance premiums from them to pay those costs because even back then that was 2.5% of GDP (8% today) because they’re, well, old, tired, and retired. Those few who had health insurance had it through their former employers, the employers for whence they’d worked 40 years then retired on a pension. How many of those employers do you see around nowadays? The 401(k) Act killed that off, the retirement plan with insurance benefits has gone the way of the no-layoff policy at IBM.
I see nothing in today’s reality that is any different from 1964 insofar as the willingness of insurers to write policies for old people for any amount of money that won’t make people’s eyes bug out. Old people simply aren’t a good insurance risk because insurers make money from things people *don’t* use, while old people are busily involved in the process of dying and thus are using health care pretty much every day.
But of course in Ryan’s fantasy world, insurers are charities, not businesses, and would flock, flock I say, to offer insurance to old people for a price well under the cost of providing medical care to old people, and then willingly eat the costs of Medicare out of their bottom line because, well, they’re just nice people! And the unicorns are pink there. Of course, in this world there are no unicorns, but WTF… dead people make Republican peckers salute, nothin’ gives them a hard-on like the thought of dead people, so eliminating the most effective old-age healthcare plan on the planet (if you manage to reach age 65 in America and get onto Medicare, you’ll live longer than if you manage to reach age 65 in almost every other nation, it’s *below* age 65 that all our excess mortality compared to other nations happens) makes his little soldier, like, salute and salute and fire off standing ovations…
– Badtux the “Righties just Luuuurrrves them some dead bodies!” Penguin
Paul Ryan collected Social Security payments from his father’s account when his father died while Ryan was a teenager. Those payments covered the cost of college, so he isn’t buried under student loans. He has worked for his family’s construction business, or politicians since college, until he won his own job by election, so he doesn’t know much about the real world.
With that kind of resume he has never had to buy health insurance on the open market. It he wanted to learn what that’s like I could ship him a few pounds of literature from people trying to sell me Medigap insurance. Let him see what the “market” wants to cover the “gaps” in Medicare coverage, and it might gibe him a clue as to the real cost of health care insurance. Medigap covers the last 20% of cost, after Medicare covers the 80%.