AARP is not a fan of the Ryan Plan
by digby
In case you were wondering where the AARP stands on the Ryan Plan, check out the letter they sent to congress about it a few months back. Here are the most relevant excerpts:
While the House Republican budget proposal offers ideas for confronting our nation’s deficits and debt, AARP believes the proposal lacks balance, jeopardizes the health and economic security of older Americans, and puts at risk the bipartisan agreement on FY 2013 discretionary spending levels included in last year’s Budget Control Act…
However, rather than recognizing that health care is an unavoidable necessity which must be made more affordable for all Americans, this proposal simply shifts these high and growing costs onto Medicare beneficiaries, and it then shifts even higher costs of increased uninsured care onto everyone else…By creating a “premium support” system for future Medicare beneficiaries, the proposal is likely to simply increase costs for beneficiaries while removing Medicare’s promise of secure health coverage — a guarantee that future seniors have contributed to through a lifetime of hard work…
The premium support method described in the proposal – unlike private plan options that currently exist in Medicare — would likely “price out” traditional Medicare as a viable option, thus rendering the choice of traditional Medicare as a false promise. The proposal also leaves open the possibility for private plans to tailor their plans to healthy beneficiaries – again putting traditional Medicare at risk. The plan fails to realize the negotiating power of Medicare and its impact on lowering costs for the Medicare program – such as in Part D of the program. Converting Medicare to a series of private options would undermine the market power of Medicare and could lead to higher costs for seniors…
While we appreciate the effort to address the sustainability of the Medicare program, we do not think it is appropriate to subject Medicare beneficiaries to an experimental and unproven health care model. We need to make sure the program remains a viable and affordable option for the over 47 million Medicare recipients that rely on the program for their health care needs…
On behalf of our millions of members and all older Americans, we reiterate our concerns about the harm this budget could cause beneficiaries of the Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security programs.
Seniors are going to be bombarded with propaganda over the next couple of months. They will be looking for validators to help them sort through it. It’s a sort of CW that they are all being brainwashed by Fox News, but it just isn’t true. There are a ton of senior citizens in this country — over 40 million of them and it’s growing every year as more boomers join the crowd. FoxNews averaged 1.868 million total viewers in prime time last year so I’m going to guess that all 40 million seniors aren’t cycling through. It will mean something to them that the AARP came out so strongly against Ryan.
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