Weekly Standard – Paul Ryan
Paul Ryan’s Moment
The Wisconsin Congressman bests his critics.
BY Matthew Continetti
Watch his appearance on Hardball with Chris Matthews yesterday:
In other entitlement news, Ryan recently published a Politico Ideas piece on America’s looming fiscal crisis. And Newsweek‘s website featured Reason‘s Peter Suderman’s take on Ryan’s Roadmap for America’s Future.
Then there’s health care reform. Ryan’s deconstruction of the claim that Obamacare reduces the deficit has become a minor YouTube classic. The Wall Street Journal reprints Ryan’s remarks in today’s paper. Democratic politicians have not bothered to refute Ryan’s arguments — they’ve left that job to liberal bloggers. But even the Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein concedes “the 10-year cost of the bill is really only counting six years of operation” and does not question Ryan’s $2.3 trillion Obamacare price tag. Klein says, instead, that Ryan “omits the information that’s actually relevant for his presentation on cost control and deficit reduction.”
Which information? That would be the Congressional Budget Office’s conjecture that health care reform could reduce the deficit by as much as a trillion dollars in its second decade of operation. But that estimate was always couched in uncertainty. Here is the CBO:
These longer-term calculations assume that the provisions are enacted and remain unchanged throughout the next two decades. However, the legislation would maintain and put into effect a number of procedures that might be difficult to sustain over a long period of time.
Those provisions include the “Doc Fix” reduction in Medicare reimbursement rates and the Independent Medicare Advisory Board (IMAB) which would mandate future reductions in Medicare. “Doc Fix” has never happened. And “the projected longer-term savings for the legislation also assume that the Independent Payment Advisory Board is fairly effective in reducing costs beyond the reductions that would be achieved by other aspects of the legislation,” CBO wrote. You know what happens when you assume! We don’t know what will happen tomorrow. How can we say with any certainty what will happen 11 to 20 years from now?
