While Reagan called for cuts in waste, fraud, and abuse of welfare programs, he was working with a Democratic House, and entitlement programs have only grown and proliferated in the past thirty years, with both parties saying yes to low taxes without saying no to new spending.
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But hospitals fear a continued jump in uncompensated care costs this year, with Congress and the White House poised to cut entitlement spending in the wake of the fiscal cliff that already saw hospitals wrestle with spending reductions.
The House bill would make huge rollbacks in entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare and farm price supports plus scores of other government programs.
Known as the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act, or Class Act, this entitlement is in both the House and Senate bills and was a top priority of the late Sen.
In light of the current budget debate, with House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan putting fundamental entitlement reform on the table, this misconception especially needs to be corrected.
When the administration unveils its fiscal 2010 budget Thursday, the key items to look for will be how the White House proposes to handle the ballooning costs of entitlement programs--Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security--and how it will offset the recent stimulus funding.
In the Democratic House, lawmakers had to offset any tax cut or entitlement increase with equivalent tax hikes or entitlement cuts.
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Ryan, the conservative House Budget Committee chairman from Wisconsin, has proposed a partial privatization of the entitlement that would provide government subsidies to help senior citizens pay for coverage they would choose from a list of options.
Speaking of the debt-limit fight, that's also coincidentally when White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew was aggressively promoting the President's campaign to prevent entitlement reform.
It is certainly important that health care, and particularly Medicare, be debated thoroughly during the Presidential campaign, as entitlement reform is one of the most pressing issues that the next Congress and White House administration will face.
At every turn he has demagogued the Romney-Ryan proposals to modernize the entitlement state so it is affordable, and he personally blew up the "grand bargain" House Speaker John Boehner was willing to strike last summer.
What I was talking about -- what has been provided by the work, the positive work that the Speaker of the House and the President did, is a lot of detail about how you could get to significant tax reform and entitlement reform, and the savings that you can glean from that, the deficit reduction you can glean from that.
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