The national health care consumer advocacy group Families USA has evaluated the Republican budget authored by Rep. Paul Ryan for its impact on federal funding for health care programs, and found nearly $3 trillion in cuts, not counting what it would do to Medicare.
The $2.75 trillion, 10-year cuts do not include other major changes that would occur later on in Medicare. Specifically, the budget proposal would change eligibility for Medicare from 65 to 67 years of age and convert Medicare to a voucher program while requiring seniors and people with disabilities to pay thousands of dollars more each year for their coverage.
The cuts arise from four sets of changes included in the House-passed bill: (1) converting Medicaid to a block grant and cutting $810 billion in funding to the states; (2) eliminating the Medicaid expansion in the Affordable Care Act, a reduction in state funding of $932 billion; (3) eliminating the health care law's tax credits for middle-class families, a reduction in funding of $806 billion; and (4) a variety of Medicare cuts totaling $205 billion.
Additionally, almost 3.8 million seniors and people with disabilities with large prescription drug costs, who fall in the Medicare drug coverage gap euphemistically called the “doughnut hole,” would lose the relief they are now receiving that is designed to make drugs more affordable. This cut would place close to 4 million seniors and people with disabilities at risk of spending an additional $6,000 in drug costs per year by the end of the decade.
Families USA also looked at the scope of the cuts
on a state-by-state basis [pdf] over the next decade, finding a range from $5.3 billion in Wyoming to $303.8 billion in California.
A second report from the group focuses on the Ryan Medicare plan, finding that people born after 1957 will see their benefits cut by 23 percent within seven years of the plan's implementation, the "equivalent to a one-year cut of $130 billion in today’s program, or more than $2,800 for an average beneficiary." The cuts, of course, get deeper as time passes and the vouchers the plan would use decrease in value. There would be a "34 percent cut in 17 years (equivalent to more than a $4,000 cut for an average beneficiary today) and a 42 percent cut in 27 years (the equivalent of more than a $5,000 cut for an average beneficiary today)."
But, of course, Ryan says his budget won't hurt poor people. He must not know any elderly people on fixed budgets. Or, more likely, he and all of his fellow Republicans who've signed onto this plan just don't care.