May 28, 2011
New York Times columnist Joe Nocera told the Democrats that they should take Paul Ryan’s plan to privatize Medicare seriously because the country will need something like this to restrain costs. In fact, the assessment of the Congressional Budget Office was 180 degrees at odds with this view. It projections showed that the Ryan plan would increase the cost of buying Medicare equivalent policies by $34 trillion over the program’s 75-year planning period.
Nocera also asserted the need for means-testing Medicare. Unless his intention is to sharply reduce benefits for people earning in the neighborhood of $60,000 a year, this route offers small savings.
The United States already pays more than twice as much per person for its health care as the average for other wealthy countries. This gap is projected to grow in the decades ahead. If the United States got its health care costs more in line with the rest of the world or allowed free trade in health care, then there would be little problem with paying for Medicare.
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