Ryan plan would boost health care, economy

Obamacare came at the American people as an endlessly complicated, incomprehensibly detailed, all-inclusive project turning medical care upside down in order to turn health right side up. Is it working? No, and while an embattled, still-evolving Republican plan will not fix everything, it could still be an enormous break for good health, consumer power and the economy.

What we have had in President Barack Obama’s European-style, socialistically ambitious program is a death spiral of uncontrollable costs brought about by hubristically redefining insurance into a business no longer allowed to make money, or at least very much.

To save themselves from extinction, insurance companies have either fled the Obamacare scene or raised premiums and deductibles to the point of absurdity while liberals have come up with an even more absurd rescue plan.

They want to hike insurance company subsidies to the point of unsustainable craziness. Obamacare taxes are meanwhile an obstacle to economic growth, mounting governmental costs are furthering the possibility of a debt crisis and more Americans have said in a survey that Obamacare has hurt them than say it has helped them.

What we have in the counter plan put forth by House Speaker Paul Ryan and a team of other Republicans and helpful experts is something different and better.

For one thing, it does away with a mandate that says buy insurance or pay a penalty and, for another, allows choice in purchasing a policy that best fits one’s own needs. The Obama team figured people are dumb, that all their choices needed to be made for them and came up with broad plans meant to fit pretty much everyone. Thus it is that men have been required to purchase coverage providing benefits if they give birth to a baby. You can’t make this stuff up. Because insurance companies have been compelled to provide cheap coverage for elderly people and those with pre-conditions, Obamacare requires young, healthy people to spend a ton in premiums to make up for it. Besides allowing the young, healthy people the freedom to buy cheaper insurance, the Ryan plan gives tax-credit subsidies to the higher-risk patients and sets the stage for high-risk pools. It also enables consumers to make things work better in their lives with boosts to such financial mechanisms as health savings accounts.

In the next 10 years, the Ryan plan would cut Obamacare taxes by some $900 billion, particularly boosting job growth and higher wages with reductions in capital gains taxes. Savings in spending over that period are estimated at $1.2 trillion, which comes to something like $300 billion in lower deficits.

All of this is a hallelujah occasion for economic growth, which means people won’t be as poor or as badly in need of Medicaid, which is also due for shrinkage and badly needed improvements. As of now, it is reported, those with no insurance at all fare as well in their health as those with Medicaid, which pays so little that many doctors will not accept Medicaid patients.

There is no argument for keeping Obamacare the way it is. It would simply fold if that happened. The Congressional Budget Office has said that there would be millions more without insurance under the Ryan plan than under Obamacare, but it reached those conclusions by way of politically required assumptions that certain announced plans would in fact materialize when many of them almost certainly will not. If its basics hold, the Ryan plan could simultaneously revitalize both the economy and health care.