Same as the old austerity guy. Georgia Republican Tom Price is taking over for Paul Ryan as chair of the House Budget Committee, and where Ryan was good at lying about wanting to wreck Social Security and Medicare, Price really doesn't give a damn.
"What I’m hopeful is what the Budget Committee will be able do is to is begin to normalize the discussion and debate about Social Security. This is a program that right now on its current course will not be able to provide 75 or 80 percent of the benefits that individuals have paid into in a relatively short period of time," he said at a Heritage Action for America event in Washington, D.C., according to AJC. "That’s not a responsible position to say, ‘You don’t need to do anything to do it.’"
Price, whose predecessor Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) never put forward major reform proposals in his otherwise ambitious budgets, offered means-testing and increasing the eligibility age as possibilities. He also hinted at privatizing Social Security.
"All those things ought to be on the table and discussed," he said.
Somehow I think means testing will vanish very quickly from Price's repertoire of "what's on the table". That leaves raising the eligibility age into the 70's and of course the big one, privatization. The key here is that Ryan was smart enough to not try to force a government shutdown over Social Security by putting it in the budget talks (and smarter still not to get involved in the clown car mess). Price apparently is looking for that fight as soon as possible.
We'll see if Democrats can stand up to him, and what can get through the Senate.
New tag: Tom Price. He's a pretty important guy these days.
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Who can blame people for not voting in the mid terms, given the stubborn refusal of the corporate sellouts and their crypto Republican front men who run the Democratic "Party" to hand out gold plated unicorns and modern monetary lollipops to every self styled member of the Base who demands one as the price for voting his own interests?
Gosh, who would have ever thought that an army of barefoot doctors might one day become the salvation of America's health care system: how very Great Leap Forward.
The sour taste in my mouth might be related to that time a nurse practitioner damn near killed me when it turned out that a once a month consult with her supervisory physician was not quite enough oversight to keep up with the potentially deadly complications on her rotation. Off to the emergency room for me while she skips the state to avoid civil and criminal liabilities.
Of course, I always had pretty good medical insurance. Perhaps there are large slabs of the nation that would have improved had we accepted Castro's generous offer of a Cuban medical corp to give an assist to our poor and downtrodden.
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