Erik Gunn of Milwaukee Magazine asks in his Pressroom Buzz column whether the Wisconsin media will do any serious critique of Rep. Paul Ryan
's "Roadmap for America's Future."
The Economist, published in London, actually has commented on the content of Ryan's proposal, rather than simply writing about how much attention Ryan's getting or wondering whether he is running for president, which is about the depth the Wisconsin media has reached.
The Economist article is devastating. "It's easy to bring down medical costs," it says. "Just stop paying them."
That is what Ryan proposes to do:
Mr Ryan has put forward a serious proposal for shrinking medical-cost inflation and hence shrinking the long-term federal budget deficit. It does so by ending America's provision of first-rate health care to all seniors. Rich seniors will still be able to afford high-quality medical care. Poor seniors won't. They will suffer more and die younger. A different approach to solving America's health-care cost problem might involve letting Medicare use its vast bargaining power to negotiate lower rates with the providers of pharmaceuticals; establishing a commission of experts (MedPAC) to rate the effectiveness of medical procedures, to avoid wasteful incentives in the current fee-for-services medical model; and establishing bundled payments for disease management, to achieve Mayo-Clinic-like efficiencies in care while improving quality. Those are the models proposed in the Democratic bills currently in Congress. But they're really complicated and hard to understand—they make for a bill that's 2,000 pages long. And everybody knows the American people hate that. Mr Ryan proposes to simply slash Medicare spending and balance the budget on the backs of poor seniors. That'll work too.
Gee, why don't we ever hear that kind of analysis about the Wisconsin Whiz Kid's great ideas in Wisconsin? Is anybody out there?