At least one could say "I believe he got most of the principles correct, but I would change x, y z".
None of them.
Chickensh!t.
I agree that is the right approach. I suspect that is what most will be saying.
Medicare is always very dangerous territory. If it was me in the House I would have proposed a plan with a consumer choice between the privatized Ryan plans and a scaled back traditional medicare option for EVERYONE, not protecting special voters.
For one thing you cant protect all those over 55 with everyone else footing the bill later getting thrown off the ship. How is a future 67 year old going to get private insurance when those a few years older are part of a massive medicare pool to demand low prices? It looks’s like those under 55 are thrown off the cruise ship into the ocean(after they retire) and told to swim on their own, to protect important voters OVER 55 on the cruise ship. and that is the big defense of the bill.
You also need a public option (traditional medicare and medicaid) for those in nursing homes with no assets many of those that can no longer make decisions. There is no private option for them. Their private option is you-know-what, ‘Soylent Green Going Home’. That is a bigger problem than many know, a huge budget buster. Example : Nursing homes on the east cost ~ 6K per month, = 72K per year. So lets see, the fellow retiring at a salary of 50K lives 15 years in a nursing home and would have to save 1.08 million dollars plus for his retirement with a boom bust economy. There is no way that is happening so this needs to be approached honestly.
Something huge like this would have to be phased in to allow market (and political) forces to work, no way around it. And it would have to be sold to voters over time, carefully attacking laying out the alternatives that Democrats propose, doing nothing but raising taxes.
They never asked me LOL, but I did call up Ryan about a month ago and told his office that they better do a better job selling their plan 'or else'.
After seeing what happened to President Bush when he tried to save SS a few years back and watching how this attempt to save Medicare is playing out, it appears to me that our politicians are too spineless to do what needs to be done to reform any of the bankrupt programs until they totally crash. It is very disheartening but I have yet to see ANY display of backbone by the Republicans to make me believe they are serious about actually cutting the spending anywhere in federal government even a little bit, much less really trying to reform entitlements.