A serious man

We all know that Paul Ryan is serious and brave when it comes to reducing our ruinous deficits.

Right.

Last week, in his speech on deficit reduction, Mr. Obama said he wanted to beef up the board’s cost-cutting powers in unspecified ways should the growth of Medicare spending exceed certain goals. Supporters say the board will be able to make tough decisions because it will be largely insulated from legislative politics.

Lawmakers do not agree. Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin and chairman of the House Budget Committee, called it “a rationing board” and said Congress should not “delegate Medicare decision-making to 15 people appointed by the president.” He said Mr. Obama’s proposal would allow the board to “impose more price controls and more limitations on providers, which will end up cutting services to seniors.”

That from a man who wants to eliminate Medicare altogether in favor of vouchers. Vouchers pegged to the rate of inflation, not pegged to the rising cost of healthcare, of which his "bold, serious" budget will do nothing to slow. Wasteful and unnecessary tests and medical devices are driving up those costs, but when given the opportunity to support a mechanism to identify waste, Paul Ryan, serious man, opposes it because it may put "limitations on providers."

Of course, Ryan is not alone in his beholdenness to medical device makers and big pharma.

“Why have legislators?” asked Representative Pete Stark of California, the senior Democrat on the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health.

In some ways, Mr. Stark said, expanding the power of the board could be as bad as giving vouchers to Medicare beneficiaries to buy private insurance. “In theory at least, you could set the vouchers at an adequate level,” he said. “But, in its effort to limit the growth of Medicare spending, the board is likely to set inadequate payment rates for health care providers, which could endanger patient care.”

Unbelievable.