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 [...]

Almost any national health care debate in this country is almost entirely disconnected from real-world examples, which is tragic given that facts have a well-known liberal bias. That is why it is incredibly depressing to see a senior fellow from the Center for American Progress is using his platform to spread incoherent ignorance. I don’t [...]

When basically the entire House Republican caucus voted for Paul Ryan’s budget, which includes a “plan” to destroy the very popular Medicare program and replace it with insufficient private vouchers, I couldn’t tell if they made such a terrible political move because they were so trapped in their own ideological bubble that they actually thought [...]

I’ve recently started being covered by a new insurance policy. As a result, I just received this over-hundred-page packet about it: the coverage rules, co-pays, benefits, requirements for getting proper approval for procedures, what counts toward the deductible, rules about out of network coverage, etc. I thought I could use this as a teaching moment [...]

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 [...]

Apparently, if I blow up your Ferrari but I replace it with an old Honda Civic, I haven’t actually destroyed your car; at least according to the bizarre logic used by PolitiFact. PolitiFact is claiming that the DCCC lied when it stated that the Paul Ryan Budget recently passed by House Republicans would end Medicare. [...]

It seems President Obama has succeed in shifting the deficit debate dramatically to the right. The right-of-center plan Obama laid out that relies on two parts spending cuts for every one part new tax revenue has already been declared the left extreme in the debate by top senate Democrats. From ABC News: Senator Dick Durbin, [...]

Republican Paul Ryan, on “Face the Nation” last weekend, tried to somehow claim Republicans posturing about possibly not raising the debt limit unless President Obama and Senate Democrats give in to their demands wasn’t “playing games” with the debt ceiling. From CBS News: Ryan, in an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday, said [...]

Today, Ezra Klein made the logical and concise case for why Paul Ryan’s Medicare privatization plan wasn’t about health care cost control but just saving the government money by shifting more of the health care cost burden onto regular people. Ryan’s plan works differently. Let’s say health-care costs grow at 8 percent a year — [...]

The deficit reduction plan President Obama vaguely outlined yesterday lacks basic credibility. The problem isn’t that the math doesn’t add up–it is at least a dramatic improvement over Republican Paul Ryan’s plan, which literally defies logic and basic math. This issue is that many of the reductions President Obama promised yesterday come from actions that [...]