America
A WAY OUT Ron Wyden, left, and Paul Ryan take the Medicare fight to Capitol Hill.
was supposed to champion biparti- sanship, dusted off the old line that the proposal would “end Medicare as we know it.” Former House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi called it “another example of the GOP’s desire for Medicare . . . to wither on the vine.” Democratic Rep. Jim McDermott of Washington, lamented, “I don’t know why Ron Wyden is giving [Republicans] cover.” The cost savings the Ryan-Wyden
A BIPARTISAN APPROACH:
Ryan’s New Plan To Save Medicare
Analysts praise his and Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden’s new proposal to rein in entitlement costs.
R BY DAVID A. PATTEN
epublicans were so alarmed by Medicare’s looming insolvency that they did something highly
unusual in Washington. They took action, passing GOP Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget and Medicare reforms last year. Soon thereafter, Democrats could be seen high-fiving each other up and down Constitution Avenue: Videos of Republicans tossing Granny off the cliff were just what Democrats needed to reverse their political for- tunes come November. President Barack Obama blasted
Ryan’s proposal as “radical” and “not particularly courageous.” What Dem- ocrats should have known, however, is that Ryan, a policy wonk and fitness-
14 NEWSMAX | FEBRUARY 2012
buff extraordinaire, would never pres- ent them with a stationary target. The ante Ryan upped in December
was a revised plan that threatened to steal the Medi-scare issue from Dem- ocrats entirely. And what wounded them most was that Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and a highly respected healthcare-policy expert in Congress, co-sponsored the proposal. “Our plan would strengthen tradi-
tional Medicare by permanently main- taining it as a guaranteed and viable option for all of our nation’s retirees,” they declared in a jointly bylined Op-Ed in The Wall Street Journal. The Democratic reaction to their
proposal was visceral and immediate. White House spokesman Jay Carney, apparently forgetting that his boss
plan promises comes from encourag- ing competitive bidding among health providers. It also would largely do away with the current fee-for-service model, in which government compen- sation for any given medical procedure is established by bureaucratic fiat. Under the plan’s partially priva-
tized “premium support” model, beneficiaries would enjoy the same or better coverage at a cost reflect- ing free-market competition. If market pressures fail to bend the cost curve as much as expected, the Ryan-Wyden plan then requires Congress to investi- gate spiraling costs, and to keep Medi- care on a budget. Democrats may find it tough to per-
suade the nation that the Ryan-Wyden plan is the radical departure they sug- gest. Most seniors already have a ben- efit that relies on the competitive bid- ding model. It is the underpinning of Medicare Part D, an entitlement credited with reducing seniors’ cost of prescriptions by over 40 percent. “That’s what makes the Ryan-
Wyden partnership so powerful,” healthcare expert and Heritage Foun- dation senior fellow Dr. Robert E. Moffit tells Newsmax. “Whether you agree with them or not . . . there is no one in the cloak room of the Senate who’s going to say, You know, that Wyden guy really doesn’t know what he’s talking about on healthcare.” Moffit adds, “The same is true of
Ryan . . . and they’ve agreed that this is the way out.”
TOM WILLIAMS/CQ ROLL CALL/GETTY IMAGES
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