Noem has Just Five Days to Promise She Won't Vote to Privatize Medicare and Social Security

76 Days and Counting Since Noem Refused to Sign Pledge To Protect South Dakota Seniors

October 28, 2010, Sioux Falls – With five days left to go until Election Day, South Dakotans are still waiting for an answer from Kristi Noem on her support for privatizing Medicare and Social Security. In May before the June primary, Noem said in a live chat with the Rapid City Journal that the “Roadmap” budget proposal authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) was the “right direction for our country to go.” The Ryan Budget is widely recognized for its revival of proposals to privatize Social Security and Medicare.  

Noem has hailed Paul Ryan as a good Speaker of the House.  She accepted contributions from Ryan’s Prosperity PAC and is an NRCC “Young Gun,” a program founded by Paul Ryan to provide support and fundraising assistance to Republican Candidates.  Noem has refused to back off from her support of Paul Ryan's budget, which would privatize Social Security and Medicare. 

By the Numbers:

·         169-The number of days since Noem said that the Ryan ‘Roadmap’ was the “right directions for our country to go.”

·         78-The number of days since Noem claimed never to have taken a position on privatization of Medicare and Social Security.

·         76 Days-The number of days since Noem refused to sign a pledge from South Dakota Seniors to oppose the Ryan Budget and all efforts to privatize Social Security and Medicare. Herseth Sandlin signed this pledge.

·         2,500- The size of the contribution Noem’s campaign received from Rep. Paul Ryan’s Prosperity PAC.

·         22,867-The amount of financial assistance Noem has received from Rep. Paul Ryan’s Young Guns program.

·         5-The number of days Noem has left to pledge to oppose the Ryan ‘Roadmap’ and assure South Dakota voters that she will not support privatization of Medicare and Social Security.

The pledge put forth by South Dakota seniors that Herseth Sandlin signed, and Noem refused, reads:

If elected to Congress I will work to protect South Dakota seniors by opposing and voting against efforts to privatize Social Security and Medicare, including the Paul Ryan budget as well as any efforts such as the proposals put forth by President George W. Bush in 2005, and any other attempt to privatize either Social Security or Medicare.

Background on Rep. Ryan’s Budget:

Senior Citizens Journal: Privatize Social Security, Medicare Into Voucher Program

According to the Senior Citizens Journal, “Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) recently proposed a “Roadmap for America’s Future:  2.0”.  In it, he suggests (among other proposals) the ‘sane’ way to proceed into the next decade would be to privatize Social Security and turn Medicare into a voucher program.” [Senior Citizens Journal, 2/6/10]

Washington Post: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security are Privatized

“To move us to surpluses, Ryan's budget proposes reforms that are nothing short of violent. Medicare is privatized. Seniors get a voucher to buy private insurance, and the voucher's growth is far slower than the expected growth of health-care costs. Medicaid is also privatized. The employer tax exclusion is fully eliminated, replaced by a tax credit that grows more slowly than medical costs. And beyond health care, Social Security gets guaranteed, private accounts that CBO says will actually cost more than the present arrangement, further underscoring how ancillary the program is to our budget problem.” [Washington Post, Klein,  2/1/10]

“Proposal Would Abolish Medicare in Its Current Form”

According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, “The Ryan proposal would abolish Medicare in its current form for everyone currently below age 55. In other words, the traditional fee-for-service Medicare program would be eliminated for everyone becoming eligible after 2020…Overall, CBO estimates that the Ryan proposal would reduce projected Medicare expenditures by 37 percent by 2040, and 76 percent by 2080. (In other words, expenditures for the vouchers that would replace today’s Medicare would, in 2080, equal 24 percent of what Medicare expenditures are projected to be under current law.) Since the proposal does little to slow the growth of provider charges for health care services or insurance company charges for premiums, most of these reductions in Medicare spending would have to be borne by elderly and disabled beneficiaries themselves or their families.” [CBPP, 3/10/10]

Plan Eliminates the Entire Children’s Health Insurance Program

The roadmap would eliminate the Children’s Health Insurance Program and convert it into a voucher program that loses value over time. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, “The Ryan plan would eliminate traditional Medicare, most of Medicaid, and all of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), converting these health programs largely to vouchers that low-income households, seniors, and people with disabilities could use to help buy insurance in the private health insurance market. Under Ryan’s plan, the value of the vouchers would fall further behind the rising cost of health care with each passing year, so they would purchase less health coverage over time… The Ryan proposal thus would sharply reduce or eliminate all major forms of health insurance that spread risk by pooling healthy and less-healthy people together on a large scale. It would do so without taking significant action to create viable new pooling arrangements. Most Americans — including the poor and the elderly — would largely be left to purchase insurance on their own with a voucher or tax credit in an insurance market that would remain largely unreformed.” [CBPP, 3/10/10]

Center for American Progress: Republican Plan Would Eliminate Medicare

In a piece titled, “House GOP Medicare Elimination Plan Puts Conservatives in a Pickle,” Matthew Yglesias of the Center for American Progress wrote that “GOP budget chief Paul Ryan’s plan to balance the budget by eliminating Social Security and Medicare is putting some of his colleagues on the hot seat.” He continued, “The House GOP budget, by contrast, just goes after Medicare with a chain saw. Right now, the rapidly rising cost of health care implies rapidly increasing Medicare costs. Ryan doesn’t have a plan to control those exploding costs. Instead, his plan is to refuse to pay the bill. This saves a ton of money.” [Center for American Progress, 2/8/10]

  

Thompson: “Gradual Extermination” of Medicare

Derek Thompson, a staff editor at the Atlantic, wrote that, “There's a bit of a debate about whether Ryan's proposal is so honest it's crazy, or so crazy it's not serious. I think it's extremely serious -- not as a budget proposal, but as a dystopian parable. It's like reading 1984 for the next century, but with graphs… Six months after the Democrats' proposed Medicare savings made Republicans shout bloody murder (literally: Death Panels), Rep. Paul Ryan is now proposing the program's gradual extermination.” [The Atlantic, 2/2/10]

NCPSSM: Plan Would ‘Destroy’ Medicare and Social Security

The National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare discussing the Ryan/Republican plan wrote, “In short, it is a budget plan which decimates Social Security and Medicare in the name of deficit reduction.  The only thing new about this strategy, is the fact that Rep. Ryan isn’t shy about acknowledging that he believes seniors should foot the bill for our current economic nightmare…Destroying Social Security and Medicare, under the guise of deficit reduction, isn’t about creating sound economic policy it’s just more of the same old privatization politics, rewrapped, repackaged and rejected by the American people just two years ago.” [NCPSSM, 2/3/10]

Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Tucker: Medicare is Eliminated

Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote that, “It might not be popular, but at least Rep. Paul Ryan, the highest-ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, has had the honesty to make a solid proposal to bring down the deficit. He wants to eliminate Medicare and Medicaid. He also proposes deep cuts to Social Security.” [Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 2/8/10]

Plan Risks Federal Bailouts of Social Security Private Accounts

Ryan’s plan privatizes Social Security which could require a federal bailout of private accounts if the market declined. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, “Under the Ryan plan, individuals who divert a portion of their payroll tax contributions to private accounts would be guaranteed that they would receive back in retirement at least as much as they contributed, plus an adjustment for inflation. In essence, they would be given a federal guarantee against stock-market losses…This guarantee could require a major federal bailout of private accounts during periods when the stock market performs poorly. The cost of this guarantee, unlike that of traditional Social Security, could escalate rapidly and add suddenly and unpredictably to the federal deficit. Providing a federal guarantee for stock-market investments also could encourage risky investment decisions by individuals, as well as misguided attempts by policymakers to shore up weak or falling stock prices in response to pressures from constituents who are relying on these accounts to support them in old age.” [CBPP, 3/10/10]

Plan Fails to Control National Debt

Despite the claims of Rep. Ryan, his plan fails to control the growth in the national debt. His claims have relied on an incomplete analysis based on assumption’s provided by Ryan’s own staff. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, “As a result of its costly new tax cuts for the wealthy, the Ryan plan would allow the federal debt to continue rising in relation to the size of the economy for at least four decades. Even in CBO’s analysis of the Ryan plan, which assumed — as Ryan’s staff specified but the Tax Policy Center has found to be incorrect — that revenues would not fall below their projected levels under current tax policies until after 2030, the federal debt would grow as a share of GDP until 2043, and the budget would not reach balance until 2063. Under the much more realistic revenue estimates that the Tax Policy Center has prepared, the budgetary outlook under the Ryan plan would be substantially worse.  Using TPC’s new revenue estimates, we estimate that the budget deficit under the Ryan plan would reach about 7 percent of GDP and the debt would grow to 90 percent of GDP by 2020. TPC estimates that revenues under the Ryan plan would average 16.3 percent of GDP over the period from 2011 through 2020.” [CBPP, 3/10/10]