Tag: medicare privatization
Evening News Virtually Ignores Paul Ryan’s Medicare Privatization Plan

Evening News Virtually Ignores Paul Ryan’s Medicare Privatization Plan

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters. 

Weekday evening programming on the largest cable and broadcast news outlets almost completely ignored a long-standing Medicare privatization scheme favored by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) in the days since he first resurrected the idea of radically reshaping the American health care system toward for-profit interests.

During a November 10 interview with Fox News host Bret Baier, Ryan misleadingly claimed that due to mounting “fiscal pressures” created by the Affordable Care Act, the Republican-led Congress would be forced to engage with what Baier called “entitlement reform” sometime next year. Ryan falsely claimed that “because of Obamacare, Medicare is going broke” and that the popular health insurance system for American seniors will have to be changed as part of any legislation to “repeal and replace” President Obama’s health care reform legacy. From Special Report with Bret Baier:

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According to a Media Matters analysis of broadcast and cable evening news coverage from November 10 to November 27, Ryan’s plan to privatize the nationwide, single-payer health care coverage currently enjoyed by millions of seniors has gone unmentioned on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox News. Ryan’s so-called “premium support” plan was briefly mentioned on the November 22 edition of PBS NewsHour when co-host Judy Woodruff pressed President-elect Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, as to whether Trump would accept Ryan’s privatization proposal. By comparison, during the same time period, MSNBC ran six prime-time segments exposing Ryan’s privatization agenda:

According to a July 19 issue brief from the Kaiser Family Foundation, conservative lawmakers are likely to pursue “a proposal to gradually transform Medicare into a system of premium supports, building on proposals” adopted by Ryan when he served as chairman of the House Budget Committee. These so-called “premium supports” would provide each Medicare beneficiary with a “voucher” that can be used for the purchase of private health insurance; they represent “a significant change from the current system” that pays health care providers directly for services rendered.

In essence, Ryan’s plan would privatize Medicare and redirect hundreds of billions of tax dollars that currently go to doctors, hospitals, and other medical service providers through the costly private health insurance market.

This startling scheme bears similarities to a failed 2005 attempt by the Bush administration to partially privatize Social Security. Democratic members of Congress are already aligning themselves against Ryan’s throwback plan to gut Medicare, and it’s not actually clear if Trump is supportive of the initiative, which he refused to fully endorse on the campaign trail.

As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) pointed out last July, claims that Medicare is “nearing ‘bankruptcy’ are highly misleading,” and Ryan’s specific charge that Medicare is “broke” because of the ACA is completely wrong. President Obama’s health care reform law greatly improved Medicare’s long-term finances and extended the hospital insurance trust fund’s solvency by 11 years.

The looming fight over the future of Medicare, which serves over 55 million beneficiaries and accounted for 15 percent of the entire federal budget in 2015, has been well-documented, but it has garnered almost no attention on major television news programs.

Millions of Americans who rely on broadcast and cable evening news are completely unaware of the stakes in this health care policy fight. They are also unaware that Ryan’s privatization scheme would leave millions of retirees at the whims of the same private insurance market that right-wing media are currently attacking because of increased rates.

Methodology

Media Matters conducted a Nexis search of transcripts of weekday network broadcast evening news programs on ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS and weekday prime-time news programming (defined as 8 p.m. through 11 p.m.) on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC from November 10, 2016, through November 27, 2016. We identified and reviewed all segments that included any mention of “Medicare.”

 

Florida Tea Party Leader Trashes GOP Plan to Privatize Medicare

The chairman of the South Florida Tea Party bashed Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare privatization plan in an email to fellow “Tea Party Patriots.” Everett Wilkinson’s blistering critique — that voters hate Ryan’s proposal to replace government-provided healthcare for seniors with a voucher program and “Republicans will lose” if they support it — was first reported by George Bennett at the Palm Beach Post:

Wilkinson broke with much of the tea party movement last week when he sent an email that calls the Ryan plan a “public policy nightmare” that could lead to “huge Democratic wins in 2012.”

Such tea party favorites as U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, U.S. Rep. Allen West, R- Plantation, and presidency- seeking House Tea Party Caucus Chairwoman Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., have voted for the Ryan plan.

But Wilkinson, in a Thursday night “Dear Patriots” email, says that in the upcoming fight over raising the national debt ceiling, “Republicans will lose if they support the Ryan Medicare plan. Americans do not support the Ryan plan.” If Democrats make big gains in 2012, Wilkinson’s email says, “Expect the GOP to then blame the Tea Party for losses.”

This sounds both like a defensive political gesture–to avoid tarnishing the Tea Party as insistent on political losers when it comes to policy–and a bit like someone going off the reservation. After all, Wilkinson was among the few Tea Party leaders to urge the GOP to steer clear of divisive social issues after the midterm elections.

In this case, perhaps the abundant senior population in his area has led Wilkinson to think Republicans and Tea Partiers are willing to drop Ryan’s budget, but the extremely strong showing it made in the House — where it passed in April — makes it easier for Republicans to pretend that voters like it. [The Palm Beach Post]