House speaker Paul Ryan has not wavered in his belief that balancing the federal budget will require reducing entitlements, putting him at odds with president-elect Donald Trump, who as far back as 2008 ripped Ryan’s Medicare proposal, calling it “political suicide.”
As Politico reports, House Republicans are determined to balance the budget in the next 10 years, but in order for then to pass their 2018 budget this spring, entitlements like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security would have to be reformed.
Just after the November election, Ryan warned:
When Obamacare became Obamacare, Obamacare rewrote Medicare, rewrote Medicaid, so if you’re going to repeal and replace Obamacare, you have to address those issues as well. What people don’t realize is that Medicare is going broke, that Medicare is going to have price controls. Because of Obamacare, Medicaid is in fiscal straits. So you have to deal with those issues if you’re going to repeal and replace Obamacare. Medicare has got some serious problems because of Obamacare. Those things are part of our plan to replace Obamacare.
House Budget Committee member Tom Cole explained, “There is no way to balance the budget without entitlement reform. It’s just simply mathematically impossible, and I think the most important thing for us is not to lose sight of that under pressure. We should write a budget that includes genuine entitlement reform.”
Rep. Chris Collins, an ally of Trump’s, warned, “We have a Republican administration with their own opinion, and we don’t want to get crosswise with them, and Donald Trump is still the head of the Republican party. But we still have our Freedom Caucus,” adding, “Who in the world would want to be speaker?”
Rep. Todd Rokita (R-Ind.), vice chairman of the Budget Committee, said hopefully, “Because he’s a businessman, and he knows how to read a balance sheet, he’s going to be able to see what the problem is, long term, regarding our debt. So I’m going to rely on that acumen to be able to have a truthful conversation about it.” He added that reducing the debt would “have to include entitlement programs: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.”
Trump’s incoming chief of staff, Reince Priebus, has stated that Trump doesn’t want to “meddle” with entitlement reforms. He noted, “He made a promise during the campaign that that was something he didn’t want to do. But what he wants to do is grow the economy, help shore up Medicare and Social Security for future generations,”
Ryan is not budging. On Thursday, he asserted, “More than half of the money going to Medicare right now is the money we borrow; Medicare goes bankrupt in the next decade. But if we want this program to succeed, we have to save it from the insolvency, the bankruptcy that’s coming.”