As news spread of Paul Ryan being named Mitt Romney's running mate, YouTube video of the House Budget Committee chairman's tour de force during the Obama ''health care summit'' in February, 2010 began going viral. But an even more sunstantive--indeed visionary--Ryan's performance regarding Obamacare isn't getting the full attention it deserves during this hotly contested campagine.
During the summit, a gob-smacked President Obama sat frozen as the seven-term Wisconsin congressman in six minutes dazzled the room with his fluency not just of the gimmicks hidden within the Democrats health legislation, but of the comlexities of federal entitlement programs and the Congressional Budget Office's scoring techniques. The episode was so embarrassing for Obama that Ryan's dissection of the plan was excised from the hours of excerpts from the summit featured on the White House website.
A month later, Ryan prophetically warned of the consequences of socialized medicine in America. ''Obamacare,'' Ryan said, was an abuse of the Constitution that moves away from the American Idea and toward a European-style welfare state that will lead millions of Americans into becoming dependent on the government rather than themselves.'' This man who in hopefully in January may be sworn in as vice-president empasized that ''even though it's not single-payer and even without the so-called public option, this is still a government takeover of health care.'' Ryan charged that it would establish ''a Washington-controlled price-setting board'' that would usurp state governments' role in regulating insurance and premiums and will further ''smother the normal market forces that would otherwise encourge innovation and cost-saving efficiences and restrict providers'decisions about what treatments are best for their patients.''
The president's claim that Obamacare would ''not add a dime to the deficit'' was a false pledge, because, as Ryan said, ''the Democrats gamed the system with 'smoke and mirrors' within the legislation for the purpose of getting favorable CBO deficit scoring, including gimmicks and double counting.'' Shortly after the abmoniation of Obamacare was passed, Ryan took to the pages of The New York Times to predict that ''the true costs of this legislation -- concealed by timing gimmicks and hidden spending -- will make the deficit explode, plunging America deeper into debt.!'' Ryan has since offered his own health reform, including shifting Medicare into a program in which the federal government substantially helps seniors pay the premiums of their private insurance plans.
The Way I See It....with the national debt exceeding $16 trillion dollars, going from under 75% of GDP during George W. Bush's last year in office to over 104% of the nation's output today, Paul Ryan's warning in retrospect sounds right-on-the-money. A Kaiser survey of nearly 2,100 private companies and state and local government agencies found that the cost of family coverage rose 9% to $15,075, suggests that Ryan's fears about ObamaCare's costs were well-founded.
The Obama campaign is undoubtedly counting on the majority of the electrorate stupidly ignoring any and all facts exposing the dire stricts America is in and believes promises of a rosey future. Team-Obama has plenty of ideas on how to attack Mitt Romney's partner, but removing the shine from a running mate who correctly predicted that ObamaCare would would bend the cost curve UP -- not DOWN -- may take an awful lot of mud.
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