House Speaker Paul Ryan is convinced that now his wet dream of privatizing Medicare will be realized.
[I]n a Fox News interview with Bret Baier, Ryan said Medicare privatization is on.
“Your solution has always been to put things together, including entitlement reform,” says Baier, using Republican code for privatizing Medicare. Ryan replies, “If you’re going to repeal and replace Obamacare, you have to address those issues as well. … Medicare has got some serious issues because of Obamacare. So those things are part of our plan to replace Obamacare.”
Ryan tells Baier, “Because of Obamacare, Medicare is going broke.” This is false. In fact, it’s the complete opposite of the truth. The Medicare trust fund has been extended 11 years as a result of the passage of Obamacare, whose cost reforms have helped bring health care inflation to historic lows. It is also untrue that repealing Obamacare requires changing traditional Medicare. But Ryan clearly believes he needs to make this claim in order to sell his plan, or probably even to convince fellow Republicans to support it.
Ryan clearly believes that it's now his country to dismantle, but he wasn't the one elected president and the guy who was has a long-standing beef with Ryan. Now, maybe he's disengaged enough with doing the stuff of government and will happily cede it to Ryan, but that goes against the promises he made during the campaign to leave Social Security and Medicare alone. It goes against his own understanding of politics as articulated in a 2013 speech at C-PAC: "As Republicans, if you think you are going to change very substantially for the worse Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security in any substantial way, and at the same time you think you are going to win elections, it just really is not going to happen."
Maybe Trump will just roll over and let Ryan rule. But that doesn't seem very Trump-like, does it.