The Democrats on the Super Committee, in their efforts to reach an deal with Republicans, have offered a new deficit reduction package and just like their last offer this one also contains cuts to Medicare benefits. From Politico: Supercommittee Democrats quietly floated details late Wednesday of a $2.3 trillion tax-and-cut proposal that includes $400 billion [...]

I don’t want to be entirely cynical about President Obama’s jobs speech yesterday. Some of the ideas in his proposal, like the money to fix up old schools, are great. He is finally putting his rhetorical focus on the issue the American people actually wanted him to be talking all along. If the package Obama [...]

I’ve found one of the saddest yet most common defenses of President Obama’s handling of his job to be the weird argument that it simply wasn’t possible for him to do a better job, or to do anything different from what he did. It always reminds me of the mantra of the misguided extreme optimist [...]

The ACA, for all of its faults occasionally gets it right. The new rules for Medicaid eligibility are one of those times. More older folks will qualify for the program and anything that moves people out of the private insurance to public insurance is a good thing.

On the monumental issue of how to deal with rising health care costs, there are no two political leaders in America whose actions are more diametrically opposed than Democratic Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin and Republican House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan. Ryan wants to privatize Medicare, destroying America’s extremely popular and effective single-payer system for [...]

Americans oppose any cuts to the country’s largest social safety net programs in order to reduce the federal deficit according to a new Kaiser Family Foundation poll (PDF). Two-thirds of Americans want no reductions in Social Security, 59 percent want no cuts to Medicare, and 53 percent want no reductions in Medicaid spending. On the [...]

The cynicism of American politicians is a strong and persistent theme, but this most recent move by Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell takes it to a whole new level. A mere six months after Republicans won big by attacking Democrats for “cutting Medicare,” McConnell is now demanding cuts to Medicare or else he will [...]

The House Republican budget written by Paul Ryan has received a huge amount of criticism for its plan to replace Medicare with a poorly indexed private voucher program that could result in more and more seniors every year being unable to afford health care. Less focus has been put on how equally devastating the Ryan [...]

Paul Ryan’s Republican budget plan would privatize Medicare and dramatically slash Medicaid over time. The result: senior citizens, poor children and the disabled paying dramatically more for care, getting worse health insurance coverage and/or losing coverage altogether, according to a report by the CBO. Under the proposal, most elderly people would pay more for their [...]

Again, some of my darkest predictions about the new health care law are coming true. With businesses again clamoring for corporate tax reduction, the go-to in Pay-Go-obsessed Washington are the affordability subsidies for people who will be using the new health care exchanges. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared that he supported the House Republicans’ [...]