This means 65- and 66-year-olds would have neither Medicare nor access to health insurance exchanges in which they could buy coverage at an affordable price and receive subsidies to help them purchase coverage if their incomes are low. Medicareįor Medicare, the CBO report reveals that the Ryan plan would raise the age at which people become eligible from 65 to 67, even as it repeals the health reform law's coverage provisions. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." The CBO report suggests that, other than for Social Security, health, and defense, Chairman Ryan has much the same vision. Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and one of Washington's most influential anti-tax conservatives, told National Public Radio in 2001, "I don't want to abolish government. Assuming defense spending remained level in real terms, most of the rest of the federal government outside of health care, Social Security, and defense would cease to exist. As CBO notes, "spending in this category has exceeded 8 percent of GDP in every year since World War II." ĭefense spending has equaled or exceeded 3 percent of GDP every year since 1940, and the Ryan budget does not envision defense cuts in real terms (although defense could decline a bit as a share of GDP). Perhaps the single most stunning piece of information that the CBO report reveals is that Ryan's plan "specifies a path for all other spending" (other than spending on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and interest payments) to drop "from 12 percent in 2010 to 6 percent in 2022 and 3½ percent by 2050." These figures are extraordinary. Yet, Medicare and Medicaid would actually fare better than most of the rest of the budget. On the chairman's plan to dramatically shrink the size and scope of government, the documents that he released show that his plan would shrink federal spending to about 20 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2015 and to 14.75 percent of GDP by 2050 - the lowest level since 1951, a time when Medicare and Medicaid did not exist. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's budget plan specifies a long-term spending path that means that, by 2050, most of the federal government aside from Social Security, health care, and defense would literally cease to exist, according to figures in a Congressional Budget Office report that was released on Tuesday.ĬBO's report, prepared at Chairman Ryan's request, also reveals that, as explained below, his plan envisions additional Medicare cuts that were not disclosed in the documents that the chairman released on Tuesday and his Medicare "premium support" and Medicaid block grant proposals differ substantially from - and have much deeper cuts than - the "Ryan-Rivlin" plan of last fall, which itself was rejected as too severe by the Bowles-Simpson fiscal commission.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |