Ryan’s plan would trigger a chain of events and I’m not sure The Economist thought deeply enough before publishing that piece.

There’s an interesting relationship between Medicare and private insurance in that the latter subsidizes the former. This is where the analysis in The Economist strikes me as too simplistic. One reason for the high cost of private insurance is doctors lose their asses on Medicare. To cite a well-known example the Mayo Clinic (the folks held up in Atul Gawande’s New Yorker article as a bright shining example of how health care should work) has stopped accepting Medicare patients because they claim they lost $840 million last year treating them. If Medicare’s payouts aren’t covering the costs of treating patients then that money has to be made back elsewhere from their other customers, thus driving up the cost of private insurance. If we get rid of Medicare and we could very well see insurance premiums go down since the gap created by Medicare will no longer need to be covered. Whether or not Ryan’s proposed vouchers would be enough to cover the cost of an insurance plan after costs readjust once is something I don’t claim to know but I won’t just assume out-of-hand that they don’t. The analysis in The Economist assumes a number of things are static which may not be the case.

Let me be clear. I’m not (yet) an advocate of Paul Ryan’s plan. I do think though that some of the analysis of it may be just as faulty as Ryan’s plan itself, if not moreso.

I also recall the GOP deriding those claims as too pessimistic.

In any case, the non-partisan TPC is also critical of Ryan’s plan on similar counts. Otherwise, we’ll have to agree to disagree as to whether ass-fscking the working class while accelerating the rate at which the insanely rich can become even richer constitutes “maybe do[ing] some good.”

It will be mildly interesting to see how Ryan adjusts his numbers, however (or whether he even bothers, given that his “plan” is little more than political theater). All-in-all, I think The Economist has the right take on the Ryan “plan,” which is consistent with the standard GOP approach.
.-= tgirsch´s last blog ..I’ll Believe It When I See It =-.

The roadmap plan was originally constructed using last year’s CBO’s long-term projections and hasn’t been updated with the most current economic data yet. If you recall last year they were telling us if we passed that alleged stimulus package that we’d keep unemployment below 8% but without it we could get as high as 9%. Obviously there have been some changes to short term economic projections so until Ryan adjusts his plan in light of how bad it’s gotten the numbers will look awful. Something as simple as a rate adjustment may be all that’s required to bring revenue into line.

I have some serious reservations about Ryan’s plan but I do commend him for offering some sort of plan that might possibly maybe do some good. It is at least preferable to the standard Washington approach.