{"id":15443,"date":"2012-09-09T22:44:59","date_gmt":"2012-09-10T02:44:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/?p=15443"},"modified":"2012-09-09T22:45:32","modified_gmt":"2012-09-10T02:45:32","slug":"political-whiplash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/?p=15443","title":{"rendered":"Political Whiplash"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ed Morrissey<\/a> at Hot Air<\/a> posted a story yesterday about one of the quickest position reversals in the history of American politics. Ever since Paul Ryan<\/a> was chosen as the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate<\/a>, we have been hearing about the plight of poor granny–destined to a future of inadequate vouchers to pay for care that she will not be able to afford. Oh, the horror of it all. Those evil vouchers. Well, not so fast.<\/p>\n

President Obama promised, “And I will \u2014 I will never turn Medicare<\/a> into a voucher.”<\/p>\n

Hot Air reports:<\/p>\n

But back in Washington, his Health and Human Services<\/a> Department\u00a0is launching a pilot program that would shift\u00a0up to 2 million<\/a>\u00a0of the poorest and most-vulnerable seniors out of the federal Medicare program and into private health insurance plans overseen by the states.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The administration has accepted applications from 18 states to participate in the program, which would give states money to purchase managed-care plans for people who are either disabled or poor enough to qualify for both Medicare and Medicaid. HHS\u00a0approved the first state plan<\/a>, one for Massachusetts<\/a>, last month.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Paul Ryan’s vouchers were optional, President Obama’s<\/a> are required.<\/p>\n

Ed Morrissey points out that the plan may actually be a good plan–similar to the Medicare Advantage plan that Obamacare eliminated. The problem is, however, that the choice is taken out of the hands of the American<\/a> citizen–not something we should encourage our government to do.<\/p>\n

The article ends with an update:<\/p>\n

Update: A couple of commenters object to my description of this as a \u201cvoucher\u201d program \u2014 but that\u2019s how Democrats describe Ryan\u2019s plan, and that doesn\u2019t have \u201cvouchers,\u201d either.\u00a0 It\u2019s a premium-support plan in a federal exchange of insurance plans approved by Medicare for coverage.\u00a0 That\u2019s what Medicare Advantage did too, and Obama raided it to pay for the Medicaid expansion in ObamaCare<\/a>.\u00a0 This plan doesn\u2019t even have the federal exchange that Ryan envisioned, but fifty different exchanges doling out federal dollars.\u00a0 Like I wrote, the plan and the experiment is worth trying, but it\u2019s precisely<\/em> the kind of push into private insurance<\/a> that Obama swore the day earlier he\u2019d never do \u2026 and he\u2019s doing it with the poorest seniors with only an opt-out in some states rather than the opt-in that Ryan\u2019s plan provided.\u00a0 I\u2019ll put quote marks on \u201cvoucher\u201d in the headline, but this mechanism only differs from Ryan\u2019s in that the exchanges get managed by the states rather than Medicare.<\/strong><\/p>\n

No wonder people don’t trust politicians.<\/p>\n

\"Enhanced<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air posted a story yesterday about one of the quickest position reversals in the history of American politics. Ever since Paul Ryan was chosen as the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, we have been hearing about the plight … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[97,221,660,1381,2849,3916,562,614,285,133],"class_list":["post-15443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-barack-obama","tag-ed-morrissey","tag-insurance","tag-medicare","tag-medicare-advantage","tag-medicare-vouchers","tag-obama","tag-paul-ryan","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-department-of-health-and-human-services"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15443"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15443\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15448,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15443\/revisions\/15448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}