Senate Rejects Paul Ryan Medicare Plan

Republicans meet with president on debt

(NEWSER) - Republicans met with President Obama today to talk about the debt, resulting in what the Los Angeles Times describes as a "pointed exchange" between Paul Ryan and Obama. Ryan accused the president and Democrats of distorting his proposal to overhaul Medicare. "It's been misdescribed by the president and many others," he said afterward. "So we simply described to him what it is we’ve been proposing so that he hears from us how our proposal works." More»

Public has never been fond of plan

(NEWSER) - GOP pollsters warned House leaders not to call a vote on Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, saying its Medicare provision was positively toxic. No matter how positively they framed the bill, the plan’s approval rating never climbed above the upper end of the 30s, and its disapproval numbers were always well above 50%, a GOP operative tells Politico . “You might not want to go there,” NRCC staffers warned in a pre-vote meeting. More»

Eric Cantor told Washington Post deal was unlikely to include Medicare

(NEWSER) - Eric Cantor moved quickly last night to dispel reports that he was aiming for a bipartisan budget compromise. With talks with the Democrats and the White House beginning today, the Washington Post had posted a story headlined “Medicare Dropped From GOP Budget Proposal,” in which Cantor was quoted as saying that Republicans probably wouldn’t be able to turn Medicare into a voucher program, as called for in the Paul Ryan budget. More»

Krugman and Krauthammer weigh in on GOP budget plan

(NEWSER) - The battle lines around Paul Ryan's budget plan are pretty well laid today in columns from Paul Krugman, who calls it both "ludicrous" and "cruel," and Charles Krauthammer, who sees it as "brave and profoundly forward-looking." Excerpts:

• Krugman, New York Times : For starters, it relies on the principle that "tax cuts pay for themselves," which Krugman denounces as "voodoo economics." And the idea of "privatizing Medicare" will probably end up raising costs by adding middlemen. Most of Ryan's $4 trillion in cuts hit low-income Americans, writes Krugman. "And by repealing last year’s health reform, without any replacement, the plan would also deprive an estimated 34 million nonelderly Americans of health insurance."

Current program a giant 'welfare' program for boomers

(NEWSER) - Paul Ryan’s ambitious Medicare overhaul proposal might be a good idea, if not for one glaring flaw: “It asks for a whole lot of sacrifice from everyone under the age of 55 and little from everyone 55 and over,” complains David Leonhardt of the New York Times . Ryan wants to force everyone under 55 into a separate program, in which they get a subsidy toward buying private health insurance, while exempting more than a third of adults from doing the same. More»