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president obama is just weeks away from leaving office. our biggest nightmare, backed by a fully republican congress, is about to take over. what that means, other than a far more hateful environment throughout the nation, is that a lot of people will lose a lot. millions will lose healthcare. they don<u+2019>t care. the national parks could be put on the auction block. they don<u+2019>t care. republicans have already started stripping seniors of their healthcare, and don<u+2019>t let them try to sell you on the benefits of privatization. there aren<u+2019>t any. 




house speaker paul ryan appeared on special report on fox with bret baier. ryan, now that he has a republican in the white house, is set to start right away repealing the affordable care act even medicare. well, he wants to privatize medicare. 




<u+201c>your solution has always been to put things together, including entitlement reform,<u+201d> says baier, using republican code for privatizing medicare. ryan replies, <u+201c>if you<u+2019>re going to repeal and replace obamacare, you have to address those issues as well. <u+2026> medicare has got some serious issues because of obamacare. so those things are part of our plan to replace obamacare.<u+201d> 




ryan tells baier, <u+201c>because of obamacare, medicare is going broke.<u+201d> this is false. in fact, it<u+2019>s the complete opposite of the truth. the medicare trust fund has been extended 11 years as a result of the passage of obamacare, whose cost reforms have helped bring health care inflation to historic lows. it is also untrue that repealing obamacare requires changing traditional medicare. but ryan clearly believes he needs to make this claim in order to sell his plan, or probably even to convince fellow republicans to support it. 




source: reverb press 




here<u+2019>s the video: 




ryan, as usual, has it completely backwards. the affordable care act is keeping medicare afloat. medicare is also solvent until 2028 and it<u+2019>s an easy fix to keep it solvent beyond that. 




health reform, along with other factors, has significantly improved medicare<u+2019>s financial outlook, boosting revenues and making the program more efficient. the hi trust fund is now projected to remain solvent 11 years longer than before the affordable care act was enacted. and the hi program<u+2019>s projected 75-year shortfall of 0.73 percent of taxable payroll is much less than the 3.88 percent of payroll that the trustees estimated before health reform. (see figure 1.) this means that congress could close the projected funding gap by raising the medicare payroll tax <u+2014> now 1.45 percent each for employers and employees <u+2014> to about 1.8 percent, or by enacting an equivalent mix of program cuts and tax increases. 




source: center on budget and policy priorities 




what privatization would mean to seniors is that instead of direct coverage, they would get subsidies from which seniors would have to buy their own insurance. now, let<u+2019>s forget for a moment that the subsidies will probably not be enough to pay for private coverage, which is much, much more expensive, but if the affordable care act is overturned, it will mean that preexisting conditions will be back. it<u+2019>s a rare senior (or person) who doesn<u+2019>t have at least one preexisting condition. in other words, privatizing medicare will be a huge giveaway to insurance companies, but seniors will be screwed.
republican leader now proposes taking away seniors<u+2019> healthcare; blames obama <u+2013> new century times
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