Liberal Media Spread Falsehoods about Ryan Budget
This afternoon Slate posted an article supposedly criticizing House Republicans for supporting an individual mandate-like mechanism as part of the House-passed budget. (The Post’s Ezra Klein jumped in with his own two cents as well.) There’s only one problem with this allegation: It is COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY FALSE. Here’s the relevant graph from the Slate piece:
The Ryan budget would reshape Americans’ access to health insurance mainly through two provisions, both of which pressure people to purchase private health insurance to an extent and through mechanisms that are materially indistinguishable from the supposedly toxic Obamacare mandate. One of these Ryan budget proposals—as yet little noticed by pundits or politicians—is almost an exact copy of its equivalent in the Affordable Care Act. It would repeal the current exclusion from employees’ income of employer contributions to their health insurance premiums, thus terminating the subsidized employer-sponsored group health regime that covers nearly 60 percent of all Americans. In its place, the Republican plan would substitute a refundable tax credit, to be provided to individuals who purchase health insurance (or to employers who purchase health insurance for their employees). When this new arrangement takes effect in 2022, the tax credit would be set at $2,300 per adult and $1,700 per child, not to exceed $5,700 per family.
Allegations aside, the Ryan budget does nothing – NOTHING – to affect the employee exclusion for health insurance benefits. It doesn’t create tax credits either, not least because budget documents can’t make programmatic changes, and only reflect budgetary assumptions. (For what it’s worth, these proposals were previously incorporated into the “Roadmap” legislation Chairman Ryan introduced in the last Congress, but the “Roadmap” and the budget are TWO SEPARATE DOCUMENTS.)
In their haste to attack Republicans for proposing true entitlement reforms, the amateur “reporters” at Slate didn’t even bother to get their facts right. Keep that in mind the next time liberals mount another rhetorical assault on Republicans for daring to reform America’s broken entitlement programs.