According to multiple reports Monday evening, President-Elect Donald Trump has settled on Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) as his nominee to become Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Price, an orthopedic surgeon and Budget Committee Chair in the outgoing Congress, is an arch-critic of ‘Obamacare’ and a top supporter of Speaker Paul Ryan’s plan to phase out Medicare and replace it with private insurance and vouchers.
On November 17th, when TPM asked Price about his timeline for moving Medicare phaseout legislation in the next Congress, Price said he did not believe it would be in the first legislation Trump and the Republican Congress would tackle in the Spring. He said he expected it would come mid-year in the second phase of the budget reconciliation process. “I think that is probably in the second phase of reconciliation, which would have to be in the FY 18 budget resolution in the first 6-8 months,” Price told TPM.
Democrats have promised to oppose any effort to phase out or privatize Medicare in the next Congress.
Check out the state of Georgia health stats from the CDC
They are below the national average but better than most of the south.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/states/GA_2015.p…
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/states/INSURANCE…
14.2% of Georgians are without health insurance vs the national average of under 9%. You figure the doctor/congressman would have a interest in improving outcomes in his home state.
Thank you, TPM, for picking up the Big Story.
A big issue in holding power, especially in the larger countries of the world such as China and the US, is maintaining some semblance of better-than-average growth. China, which came late to the Industrial Revolution, has been able to copy a lot of technology and bring itself quite close to the modern technology frontier at a fraction of the cost, all the while growing its economy at a high rate. The US earlier enjoyed high growth, but also eventually came up against the technology frontier. Post WWII, this effort was embodied in the Race to the Moon. The Chinese economy is now slowing and the US will be hard-pressed to break 2% GDP growth next year. And the options for increasing growth are modest without the innovation push to go with it, so the top candidate becomes debt-fuelled stimulus, usually in the form of big infrastructure projects. China’s debt is now at least 250% of GDP and the US is 330%. In both cases, a lot of debt has been privately acquired and the goal of certain large financial actors, as during the Great Recession, is to move that private debt onto the public balance sheet. Medicare is a big pile of money, with outlays annually about equal to the defense budget. And Medicare is fully funded and solvent through 2028 even with this:
What Price proposes is nothing less than cannibalization of a successful government program, perhaps to make room for spending on other actors. But it’s not that simple. Moreover, unless the Republicans are planning to create savings and replace Medicare with a universal health care arrangement as in Sweden or Finland, it is hard to see how this amounts to much more than organized theft.
Tie that albatross around Trump’s neck and mention it daily. Ask every old person you know if they have talked to their insurance agent about replacing medicare coverage to respond to Trump’s plan. Ask them how much the new policy will cost.
I’m old. I’m on medicare (with an advantage plan to cover the 20%) and the whole reason medicare was invented in the first place was that insurance companies just didn’t cover old people. They still don’t want to do very much.
This is Ryan’s dream. Trump probably doesn’t want to be known as the President who killed Medicare. Medicare/SSecurity aren’t known as the third rail for nothing.
I guess I’m niave but I really don’t understand what is driving this charge to kill the ACA and Medicare.
Talking about killing the ACA under Obama was typical politics of hanging it around Obama’s neck and skewing perception of it as a bad thing. But now it’s shown to be immensely beneficial to the overall economy, has given insurance to 21M and removed medical bankruptcy from our lexicon. Republicans could come in and improve it and be saviors as well as curry favor with the insurance industry. Instead… they double down on killing Medicare which will remove a social safety net crucial to our poor and elderly. It will force the rest to spend an increasing percentage of earnings (which most can not afford) for health costs. Who benefits here? Whats driving this and what’s the win here for the GOP.
As a Dr., Price of all people should know and understand all of this and in fact he took an oath to do no harm as I recall.
Medicare is the cheapest healthcare system in the US at the moment. Eliminating it will almost certainly mean the same treatments will be more expensive, which means that more money goes out of your and my pockets into someone in the private healthcare system that replaces Medicare.
That’s the immediate value.
Beyond that is the fact that Medicare is a well loved program that very clearly illustrates that government works (at least when it’s not being run by Repubkican loons). But the entire point of the Republican Party is to drown government in a bathtub and the popularity of social security and Medicare are impediments to that goal. They tried social security privatization in the 2000s and it failed miserably. They are now trying Medicare privatization and have much higher hopes of success because they can pass it off as Obama’s fault and Obamacare reform.