Vouchercare Is Not Medicare

Paul Krugman has a column in the New York Times that looks at the reality of the GOP proposal to "reform" Medicare. It seems the GOP extremists are growing increasingly testy over news reports that accurately describe what would really happen to Medicare - a program relied on by countless senior citizens. I'm not saying that reforms to the program are not need. What I am saying is that it would be nice if members of the GOP had the balls to tell the truth about what their proposal would mean for so many of the elderly - and their families who will have to take up the financial slack that would hit their family members. Sadly, honest and the GOP seem to be increasingly mutually exclusive - I guess they think they are like the Christianists who have deleted the Commandment against lying from the Ten Commandments. Here are some column highlights:
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What’s in a name? A lot, the National Republican Congressional Committee obviously believes. Last week, the committee sent a letter demanding that a TV station stop running an ad declaring that the House Republican budget plan would “end Medicare.” This, the letter insisted, was a false claim . . .
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Comcast, the station’s owner, rejected the demand — and rightly so. For Republicans are indeed seeking to dismantle Medicare as we know it, replacing it with a much worse program.
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I’m seeing many attempts to shout down anyone making this obvious point, and not just from Republican politicians. For some reason, many commentators seem to believe that accurately describing what the G.O.P. is actually proposing amounts to demagoguery. But there’s nothing demagogic about telling the truth.
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[Y]ou can name the new program Medicare, but it’s an entirely different program — call it Vouchercare — that would offer nothing like the coverage that the elderly now receive. (Republicans get huffy when you call their plan a voucher scheme, but that’s exactly what it is.)

Medicare is a government-run insurance system that directly pays health-care providers. Vouchercare would cut checks to insurance companies instead. Specifically, the program would pay a fixed amount toward private health insurance — higher for the poor, lower for the rich, but not varying at all with the actual level of premiums. If you couldn’t afford a policy adequate for your needs, even with the voucher, that would be your problem.
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And most seniors wouldn’t be able to afford adequate coverage. A Congressional Budget Office analysis found that to get coverage equivalent to what they have now, older Americans would have to pay vastly more out of pocket under the Paul Ryan plan . . . the typical senior would end up paying around $6,000 more out of pocket in the plan’s first year of operation.
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Vouchercare, by contrast, would simply hand out vouchers of a fixed size, regardless of the actual cost of insurance. And these vouchers would be grossly inadequate.
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Yes, Medicare has to get serious about cost control; it has to start saying no to expensive procedures with little or no medical benefits, it has to change the way it pays doctors and hospitals, and so on. . . . . But with these changes it should be entirely possible to maintain a system that provides all older Americans with guaranteed essential health care.
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Canadian Medicare, then, looks sustainable; why can’t we do the same thing here? Well, you know the answer in the case of the Republicans: They don’t want to make Medicare sustainable, they want to destroy it under the guise of saving it.