The rave over the last few weeks was fake news. While Republican Speaker of the House is busy dismantling Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare, the mainstream media is silent, and Paul Ryan is using Fox News as its fake news conduit.
Paul Ryan uses Fox News to promote Medicare fallacies
Paul Ryan is pulling a Medicare scam on the American people, and the broadcast networks are not making it the centerpiece of reporting that they should.
In a recent interview with Fox News, Paul Ryan lied about Obamacare and Medicare with a false authority on the subject that gives it a modicum of credulity absent the refuting information. Mediamatters fulfilled its mission.
During a November 10 interview with Fox News host Bret Baier, Ryan misleadingly claimed that due to mounting “fiscal pressures” created by the Affordable Care Act, the Republican-led Congress would be forced to engage with what Baier called “entitlement reform” sometime next year. Ryan falsely claimed that “because of Obamacare, Medicare is going broke” and that the popular health insurance system for American seniors will have to be changed as part of any legislation to “repeal and replace” President Obama’s health care reform legacy. From Special Report with Bret Baier:
Paul Ryan is promoting the privatization of Medicare without explicitly saying the word. Mediamatters continues the dissection.
According to a July 19 issue brief from the Kaiser Family Foundation, conservative lawmakers are likely to pursue “a proposal to gradually transform Medicare into a system of premium supports, building on proposals” adopted by Ryan when he served as chairman of the House Budget Committee. These so-called “premium supports” would provide each Medicare beneficiary with a “voucher” that can be used for the purchase of private health insurance; they represent “a significant change from the current system” that pays health care providers directly for services rendered.
In essence, Ryan’s plan would privatize Medicare and redirect hundreds of billions of tax dollars that currently go to doctors, hospitals, and other medical service providers through the costly private health insurance market.
This startling scheme bears similarities to a failed 2005 attempt by the Bush administration to partially privatize Social Security. Democratic members of Congress are already aligning themselves against Ryan’s throwback plan to gut Medicare, and it’s not actually clear if Trump is supportive of the initiative, which he refused to fully endorse on the campaign trail.
As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) pointed out last July, claims that Medicare is “nearing ‘bankruptcy’ are highly misleading,” and Ryan’s specific charge that Medicare is “broke” because of the ACA is completely wrong. President Obama’s health care reform law greatly improved Medicare’s long-term finances and extended the hospital insurance trust fund’s solvency by 11 years.
We speak about the Trump voter as an ill-informed voter. The reality is most voters are. They make bad choices when they entertain the disinformation without question. And the mainstream media continues its dereliction.
Over 55 million Americans benefit from Medicare. 15% of the budget is Medicare expenditures. One would think that this matter of vital economic importance to millions of Americans would get more coverage than Kanye in the hospital. But it does not. The mainstream media is worried about fake news on social media? Americans should be worried about no news coming from the mainstream news media. Americans should be concerned that the press is but the propaganda engine of the plutocracy and its peons, the establishment Republicans and corporate Democrats.
