Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA), the tea party congressman who’s running in Georgia’s 2014 U.S. Senate race, wrote in an op-ed published online Monday that the budget proposal put forth by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) “fails to seriously address runaway govermnent spending.”
“We have to dig deeper and make profound cuts now,” Broun wrote in the New York Times. “We cannot continue to assume that future Congresses will do our dirty work for us.”
Ryan’s budget assumes the unlikely repeal of the Affordable Care Act, a provision of the proposal that has drawn criticism even from some conservative sources. But Broun, a physician with an M.D. and a B.S. in chemistry, argued that Ryan does not go far enough on the health care front.
As a family doctor for more than 30 years, I understand that we must look for savings in our health care system too. I recently co-sponsored legislation that would convert Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program into state-managed programs through a single federal block grant. This would save approximately $2 trillion over 10 years by capping federal funding at 2012 levels for the next 10 years and giving states an incentive to seek out and eliminate waste, fraud and abuse. The government agency closest to the consumer can most efficiently manage taxpayer dollars.
We’re not done. We must repeal Obamacare — including the associated taxes, which the Ryan budget leaves intact by assuming the enactment of tax reform later on. We’ll replace it with a market-based health care system devoid of government involvement and managed by patients and their doctors, a plan I have described in my Patient Option Act.
If we get government out of the way and put Medicare in patients’ hands by increasing contribution limits to health savings accounts, it will transform Medicare into a more flexible premium assistance program.
