House Speaker Paul Ryan has seen the writing on the wall and has proposed a restructuring of Medicare into a premium-support model to serve those who come into the system in the future. Democrats have attacked this as “privatizing Medicare,” and Pelosi warned this week that she will rally Democrats to defeat any attempt by Republicans to implement it. She warned Ryan what happened when George W. Bush tried reforming Social Security in 2005.
“Bush had just been elected,” Pelosi told Washington Post analyst Greg Sargent. “He gave us an opportunity by saying he would partially privatize Social Security. Everybody stuck together. The opportunity that we have now is the equivalent of the opportunity we had in ’05.”
Ryan’s likely to take that advice, although not because Pelosi offered it. A decade ago, conservatives had built a good public case for entitlement reform and had a president who wanted to accomplish it. In 2017, however, they will have a president who openly dismissed talk of restructuring entitlement programs, insisting that he can make it work by putting his superior business acumen to work on it. The populists who lifted Trump to the White House have little taste for revamping Medicare or Social Security.
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