How Paul Ryan Would Decimate the New Deal

[n2doc]

Mike Konczal and Bryce Covert September 12, 2012

Republican vice-presidential pick Paul Ryan is widely considered a leading conservative policy intellectual on welfare and entitlement spending. His budget—loosely adopted by the Republican Party platform—calls for a massive reduction in programs that benefit Americans broadly, and the poor specifically, in order to pay for big tax cuts. But his vision goes further, fundamentally altering the way the United States provides for the poor and elderly. Ryan’s plan takes the social insurance promises of the New Deal and the Great Society and turns them into something far riskier and less dependable.
?
Ryan’s vision for reforming the social safety net can be explained in three verbs: he wants to block grant Medicaid, voucherize Medicare and privatize Social Security. Yes, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security would likely still exist, but those changes would mean a profound difference for the average person who receives government benefits over his or her lifetime. Let’s look at what happens to Jessie, a low-income woman living in Pennsylvania who is eligible for all three programs at different periods of her life.

Medicaid

When Jessie is a child, her parents make a combined $30,000 a year. Because their income is under 133 percent of the federal poverty line, Jessie and her brother get health insurance through Medicaid. After Jessie gets older and becomes pregnant, she again enrolls in Medicaid. She and her partner only make $20,000, under the threshold of 133 percent of the federal poverty line for a couple, qualifying her under the federal requirement that pregnant women living at that income be covered. (Medicaid eligibility will expand significantly if the Affordable Care Act is fully implemented—a bill that Ryan, Mitt Romney and the Republican Party vow to repeal.)

Medicaid is a program designed to provide healthcare for people in poverty, an agreement between the federal government and states to jointly finance healthcare benefits. Since it involves cost sharing between federal and state governments, the federal government requires states to adhere to a defined level of benefits and eligibility baselines, which includes pregnant women and children. And lucky for Jessie, who also has diabetes, her chronic care will be covered while she’s on Medicaid.

more

http://www.thenation.com/article/169882/how-paul-ryan-would-decimate-new-deal#

[riverwalker]

1. if your parents are old, or if you plan to get old

Currently, Medicaid nursing home costs are recovered from the estate, it is basically a loan. If grampa had an old car or savings account, Medicaid claims it after he dies (if he or his spouse recieved Medicaid). The new proposal, is to recover the costs from the family, his children. So the money you have saved for a childs college, is going to go to Dad's nursing home instead.

http://www.medicareadvocacy.org/2011/04/21/what-happens-to-current-nursing-home-residents-if-the-house-budget-resolution-becomes-law/

[dkf]

2. Our budget problems are going to decimate the new deal.

The only impact Obama will have on future entitlements is if he puts us on a better fiscal trajectory.

Other than that he can't make promises for future congresses or Presidents.

[n2doc]

3. Yep. Go back to historic tax collection rates and most problems are solved

I keep saying, if the Righties loooove Reagan so much, why not go back to at least the tax rates at the end of his second term? And if they hate deficits so much, why not go back to Clinton's rates? Americans did just fine paying those tax rates.

And cut military spending to a reasonable level.

[dkf]

4. The Clinton tax rates should do it...but we need all of it not just the top.

[sarcasmo]

5. They only care about the womb, after that it's a big F U.