A column by Simon Lazarus in Slate this week reveals that Rep. Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap to Prosperity” plan contains provisions that would pressure people to purchase health insurance just as much as the allegedly “freedom-squelching” individual coverage provision of the Affordable Care Act.
In a blog post citing Lazarus’s piece, ThinkProgress points out that Ryan admitted as much during a town hall meeting in Wisconsin last week.
In answering a question regarding his proposal for a Medicare voucher program he said:
Its mandate works no different than how the current Medicare law works today, which is you just select from a wide range of different plans. It literally would be like Medicare Advantage…
As Lazarus, who is public policy counsel for the National Senior Citizens Law Center, points out in his column, “These Ryancare mandate lookalikes are not merely evidence of Republicans' political hypocrisy. They bear heavily on the asserted legal basis for the pending court challenges to the constitutionality of the ACA mandate provision. The ACA's combination of tax incentives and subsidies is functionally equivalent not only to Republicans' proposals for amending the existing social safety net, but to existing guarantees enacted long ago.”
Lazarus is the author of two ACS Issue Briefs on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, available here and here.
Watch video of Ryan’s comments below.
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