Ryan-Wyden Premium Support Proposal Not What It May Seem
Likely Would Shift Substantial Costs to Beneficiaries, Threaten Traditional Medicare, and Produce Few Savings
By Paul N. Van de Water
December 16, 2011
The proposal for Medicare premium support by House Budget Committee
Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) differs in key
respects from how many media reports are describing it.
[1]
Despite claims to the contrary, it likely would shift substantial
costs to beneficiaries rather than protect them from such cost
increases, could lead to the demise of traditional Medicare over time
rather than preserve it, and likely would produce few savings.
Shifts Costs to Beneficiaries
Its
sponsors say the proposal would avoid shifting health costs to
beneficiaries, but that’s not so. It would replace Medicare’s
guarantee of health coverage with a flat payment that beneficiaries
would use to help them purchase either private health insurance or
traditional Medicare. It also would limit the growth in spending per
beneficiary to the growth of gross domestic product (GDP) plus one
percentage point (presumably on a per capita basis). But health care
costs have risen faster than that for several decades and, as Chairman
Ryan acknowledged at a December 15 briefing, if that faster rate
continues,
the amount of the government’s premium support payment to beneficiaries would be cut back
— with more of the costs of coverage shifted to beneficiaries — unless
Congress intervened and made offsetting cuts elsewhere within Medicare.
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