Numerous political columnists and analysts have applauded Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan's budget House Republican proposal for 2012, with "courageous" and "bold," being the key adjectives being employed.
But as we've been reporting on since the 40-year-old Congressman unveiled the plan nearly a week ago, Ryan's "courage" in attempting to deal with Medicare and Medicaid amounts to putting specific caps on how much the government will pay for those extremely expensive government run health care programs – which undoubtedly will reduce the deficit, as is seemingly the only thing that matters in D.C. these days. But on its face it means that a lot of poor and elderly people are going to have a harder time to pay for their health care needs. And Ryan's plan actually begins by repealing the Affordable Health Care Act of 2010, which is designed to get approximately 32 million more people out of going straight to the emergency rooms and on a health care plan.
Neither plan truly does anything about bending the cost curve, as we've learned over the past year and a half to refer to the seemingly never ending increase in health care costs.
This article appears in Apr 7-13, 2011.
