Even though budget negotiations to fund the rest of the current fiscal year are ongoing, Republicans already are releasing their funding plans for the 2012 fiscal year.
Rep. Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, gave an outline of his 2012 budget proposal to counter President Barack Obama’s budget plan on Sunday – on Tuesday he will officially announce his budget to fund the government beginning Oct. 1. In an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Ryan said his plan would reduce spending by more than $4 trillion over 10 years and would make dramatic changes and spending reductions to Medicaid and Medicare.
“We intend to not only cut discretionary spending and put caps on spending, you have to address the drivers of our debt,” Ryan said. “We need to engage with the American people on a fact-based budget, on stopping politicians from making empty promises to people and talk to the contrary about what is necessary to fix these problems.”
Ryan said he planned to change Medicare into a “premium support system” similar to the one he worked on with Democrat Alice Rivlin. The change would not affect the entitlement program for those 55-years-old or older.
“It works like the Medicare prescription drug benefit, similar to Medicare Advantage today, which means Medicare puts a list of plans out there that compete against each other for your business, and seniors pick the plan of their choosing, and then Medicare subsidizes that plan,” he said. “More for the poor, more for people who get sick and we don’t give as much money to people who are wealthy.”
The budget chairman’s plan also calls for a change to how Medicaid is funded.
“We propose block grants to the states,” he said. “We’ve had so much testimony from so many different governors saying give us the freedom to customize our Medicaid programs, to tailor for our unique populations in our states. We want to get governors freedom to do that.”
Other aspects of Ryan’s budget proposal include lowering tax rates and broadening the tax base, putting a statutory cap on discretionary spending as a percentage of the economy and making the Bush tax cuts permanent.
“We’re not going to go down the path of raising taxes on people and raising taxes on the economy,” Ryan said Sunday on the political news show. “We want to go after the source of the program, and that is spending.”
Democrats already are pushing back against Ryan’s proposal, though, with the ranking member on the House Budget Committee saying he would fight against the Republicans’ plans to turn Medicaid into a block grant system.
“Although our Republican colleagues have not yet released their proposed budget resolution, all indications are that they would like to dismantle the Medicaid program, doing serious damage to the health care safety net in this country, particularly for senior citizens and persons with disabilities who rely on Medicaid for long-term care,” Van Hollen said in a statement last week.
Some Democrats might be pushing back against his proposals, but other Democrats said they would wait to see what the details of the plan were before voicing support or opposition to it – although they said they were skeptical of his plan to reduce spending by trillions of dollars without it meaning taking significant resources from social programs.
“I don’t know how you get there without taking basically a meat ax to those programs who protect the most vulnerable in the country,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “I’ll give anybody the benefit of a doubt until I get a chance to look at the details, but I think the only way you’re going to really get there is if you put all of these things, including defense spending, including tax reform, as part of the overall package.”
Like what you read? Want to read more about issues related with Democrats either nationally or in California?
Click SUBSCRIBE at the top of the page to receive email alerts when new articles are published.
Other articles Amanda has written can be found here.
If you have other ideas or tips on political news stories Amanda can or should cover, she can be emailed at AGG12587@aol.com.
Comments