An Alternative to Paul Ryan's Plan: End Medicare

National Review Online: End Medicare:

We’re all sinners, and Congressman Ryan’s past walks on the wild side do not render hollow his earnest plea that we deal with the entitlement cancer metastasizing in our body politic. But his prescription is not a cure. It’s an aggressive treatment of symptoms that leaves the cancer in place, under the delusion that Dr. Government can be trusted to manage it.

Representative Ryan buys the foundational premise of Medicare: to wit, health care is a corporate asset — not a commodity subject to the assumptions of ordinary commerce (i.e., individual choice, controlled by one’s personal resources and priorities), but a fundamental right to which the central government must ensure access. This is the plinth of the entitlement edifice — the “second Bill of Rights” — that began construction in the New Deal, under the direction of designers who knew full well that it was financially unsustainable.

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