Wisconsin (R) Congressman Paul Ryan has revealed his utopian fix to American economic woes,which includes replacing Medicare with a subsidy scheme for older Americans that gives them a fixed amount to buy medical coverage from private providers.
This is nothing but a Wizard of Oz act. Ryan promotes this ploy as a way to reduce the cost of healthcare because it will force healthcare providers to compete for millions of Americans' healthcare dollars, thus will drive prices down.
There are three glaring fallacies (and probably many more) with this claim:
(1) If millions of Americans having to buy private insurance will force healthcare costs down, which is a premise of his plan, then why hasn't that happened already? Most Americans, either individually, via cooperatives or, most commonly, via their employers have been buying private medical insurance for decades and healthcare costs have skyrocketed.
(2) This sounds like the Wal-Mart approach to healthcare shopping. You know, buying healthcare on the cheap. Is that how we will all decide which doctor to see, which hospital to go to, which radiology unit to get xrays for a broken bone, an MRI or bone scan done? The cheapest doctor? Really? The cheapest hospital? The cheapest xray unit? And what kinds of corners will those facilities cut so they can be the cheapest? What kinds of qualifications and how much experience will the technicians have? What will the infection rates be? And who, in Ryan's universe of deregulation, will be watchdogging these doctors, technicians, profiteers and holding them accountable?
(3) The competition Ryan is fantasizing about will be among insurers who will be competing for healthcare insurance buyers' dollars, not among healthcare providers. ...and we've all seen just how that has worked so far, right? It won't do a thing to affect healthcare costs, except that it won't even begin to put the brakes on the astronomical skyrocketing of the past few decades (think: since Richard Nixon changed the rules that enabled healthcare providers to becom for-profit entities) that have sent them into outer space.
This is just another version of another Wisconsinite's idea of "open for business" except the reality is it will be "open season" on vulnerable, unsophisticated people who will once again be duped by the scam of so-called capitalism-American style, which is gouge people til it hurts or kills, 'cause the rich can never, ever be rich enough, and to buy enough politicans to make sure laws are enacted to keep it legal.
This begs the question that's been hanging out there ever since the (R)s started pandering to the tpers and winning elections by disguising themselves as fiscal 'conservatives' and sanctimonious stewards of "the people's" money, when they and baby Bush are the very ones who ran wild with the country's credit card and enabled/encouraged Wall Street and the banking industry to rob middle America of its jobs, homes, pensions and safety nets. And we, as a country, are such gullible little Red Riding Hoods, that we believe them all the way down their gullets.
The only real beneficiaries of Ryan's plan will be private insurers and their shareholders and medical providers who will be able to continue their high-cost ways.
I'm truly conservative about not privatizing government services that will result in continuing the gush of middle- and low-income Americans' money into the luxury boxes of the uber-rich.
Rather than eliminate the only single-payer healthcare system this country has, and which people love and want to keep in place, we need to be making a single-payer system available for all Americans. It is possible to make Medicare more cost-effective and affordable for the country and to extend that system to everyone who wants it. It starts with finding ways to collar and lower the spiraling out-of-control actual cost of providing healthcare. That's where Ryan and all of this country's leaders need to focus their attention.
