Healthcare: Comparing Ryan's Medicare Plan to What Congress Gets

In an Op-Ed piece in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Ryan wrote, Starting in 2022, new Medicare beneficiaries will be enrolled in the same kind of health-care program that members of Congress enjoy.

He repeated that assertion on NBC's Meet the Press on April 10, when he said, For future generations, what we are proposing is a personalized Medicare, a Medicare system that works exactly like the health care I have as a member of Congress and federal employees have.

Exactly? I beg to differ.

There is a huge difference in one important aspect between the Medicare program in the Ryan budget plan and the Federal Employee Health Benefit Plan, or F.E.H.B.P., for federal employees and for members of Congress.

Basically, the F.E.H.B.P. is best described as a typical employer-sponsored health insurance plan. The federal government's — that is, taxpayers' — annual contribution to the premiums paid to competing private insurers by employees and members of Congress would rise in step with the average premiums charged by the private insurers (see Page 1).

These premiums have been rising over time more or less in step with the overall increase in per-capita health spending in this country.

By contrast, under the Ryan plan, the federal contribution toward the purchase of private health insurance by future Medicare beneficiaries would be indexed only to the Consumer Price Index (see Page 2 of the C.B.O. analysis).

For more, see Comparing Ryan's Medicare Plan to What Congress Gets by UWE E. Reinhardt, April 18, 2011 at Economix.