Earlier this week in New Hampshire, Republican presidential candidates touted the benefits of a Medicare premium support system — the approach to entitlement reform embraced by House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) and The Heritage Foundation. Ryan’s recent partnership with Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) helped thrust the idea of premium support back into the national spotlight. Their bipartisan framework represented a breakthrough on Capitol Hill after liberals spent much of the year making false charges about Ryan’s plan. Given the misleading information about premium support, let’s first take a moment …
Medicare is in dire need of reform. This week’s chart illustrates why the entitlement program is the largest driver of long-term runaway deficits. With the country’s population aging and increasingly dependent on health care, Medicare’s cost to taxpayers is projected to rise from $522.8 billion in 2010 to $932 billion in 2020. The Heritage Foundation has long championed reforms for Medicare, most recently as part of Saving the American Dream. Heritage’s Bob Moffit recently outlined a two-stage approach to reform. The first step is saving the current program, then moving …
Congressman Paul Ryan (R–WI) and Senator Ron Wyden (D–OR) have proposed a new bipartisan framework for structural Medicare reform. It continues the conversation with the American people on a solution to save the popular but financially troubled entitlement program. While there are differences between the proposal and the Heritage plan outlined in Saving the American Dream, and while their proposal does not go as far or as fast as it should in changing the massive entitlement program, it would establish a premium-support system of financing for Medicare, a variant of …
On Monday Politico ran a column by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) taking issue with my critique of his proposal to accelerate the granting of waivers under Obamacare. Unfortunately, he missed a central point I was making about limitations on the waivers that could be granted. Apparently the senator was offended by this paragraph, from my New England Journal of Medicine piece on his bill: Even more problematic to proponents of state flexibility on both the left and the right is that states would not be able to fold other health …
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) told The Washington Post this week: “This is getting to be Judgment Day on the spending issue. I’ve come to the conclusion that voters are saying now that just throwing money at various kinds of issues — virtually all of which are deserving — isn’t good enough.” Throwing money at issues isn’t good enough? Sen. Wyden is just now learning this? Too bad his fellow colleagues in the Senate haven’t. Politico reports: In a roll of the dice, Democrats moved Thursday to take up a roughly …
Here’s a simple fact: It’s impossible to reform the health insurance markets and create a consumer-driven system based on personal choice and real health plan competition without reforming the federal tax treatment of health insurance. All arguments to that fact, from Republicans and Democrats alike, are nonsensical. So, it’s heartening when self-proclaimed progressive Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) is on the same page as the Heritage Foundation and the nation’s leading conservative health policy analysts on the central issue of federal tax policy. Wyden’s comments today at the Urban Institute underline …
MINNEAPOLIS — Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT) came to the Hubert Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs to “shill” for the Healthy Americans Act he’s co-sponsoring with Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR). Bennett insisted his bill was meant to expand the debate on health care policy with the hope that it could become the framework for real legislative action next year. The driving force behind the Wyden-Bennett bill is the belief that the health care system cannot be fixed without changing the tax code. Specifically, their plan targets the subsidies businesses receive to …
