Ezra writes:
The bottom line is this: The Affordable Care Act is actually doing the hard work of reforming the health-care system that’s needed to make cost control possible. Ryan’s budget just makes seniors pay more for their Medicare and choose their own plans — worthy ideas, you can argue, but ideas that have been tried many times before, and that have never cut costs in the way Ryan’s budget suggests they will.
That’s why, when the Congressional Budget Office looked at Ryan’s plan, they said it would make Medicare more expensive for seniors, not less. The reason the deficit goes down is because seniors are paying 70 percent of the cost of their insurance out-of-pocket rather than 30 percent. But that’s not sustainable: We’ve just taken the government’s medical-costs problem and pushed it onto families.
The CBO report addresses Medicare on page 30 and social security in Chapter 3 at page 46.
As for raising taxes, the Affordable Care Act already does that. From this CBO report on the law:
PPACA will, among other things, raise revenues to pay for expanded health insurance coverage by imposing excise taxes and fees on industries in the health care sector, limiting tax-advantaged health accounts, increasing the Medicare payroll tax on upper-income households and adding an additional tax on net investment income on upper-income households. The new law will also eliminate the tax deduction for expenses allocable to the Medicare Part D subsidy to employers.
As for where you can read the bills yourself, look for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA; P.L. 111-148), with amendments at the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (P.L. 111-152).
So, is Obama going to propose even more cuts and taxes for Medicare? We don't need them. Is he going to propose tinkering with social security benefits?
Here are Obama's views from 2008 on social security . He was sympathetic to seniors in 2008, even proposing to eliminate income taxes on those making under $60,000 a year. What will he propose now?
If Medicare and Social Security get torpedoed, can those of us who are under 65 and not collected a dime, and who have paid in hundreds of thousands of dollars, get our money back?
