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September 18, 2012 10:48 AM
Medicare: Where’s the evidence that vouchers save money?
The National Journal seeks some, and comes up empty
Margot Sanger-Katz, a National Journal reporter who has been brave enough to question conventional wisdom surrounding health policy—she reported that elements of the Affordable Care Act “designed to lower costs will likely raise them instead”—has now taken a hard look at the claims and rhetoric sloshing around about vouchers lowering the government’s Medicare bill. She asked a reasonable question, one...
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April 7, 2011 10:27 AM
New York Has Clarity on the Ryan Budget
A quick thank you to Dan Amira of New York magazine’s Daily Intel blog, who has published just the dummies guide to Paul Ryan’s budget proposal that we asked for early in the week—okay, Amira called it “the Absolute Moron’s Guide.” The piece is written as a Q&A with a savvy but clueless questioner and a befuddled but informative...
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August 31, 2012 11:07 AM
The Wall Street Journal lets Paul Ryan go all but unchecked
Misleading claims get ignored or given he said-she said treatment
The Wall Street Journal's coverage of Paul Ryan's speech to the Republican National Convention Wednesday, which was packed with one hypocrisy and misleading claim after another, has been awfully weak. On page one the day after, its story doesn't bother to fact check a single one of Ryan's claims, though even Wolf Blitzer knew immediately that many were bogus. Worse,...
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May 25, 2011 12:54 PM
A Beat Memo on Medicare
Is the Ryan plan really so novel?
Perhaps no other health issue is as important to so many Americans now and in the future as Medicare. In this ongoing series, “Covering Medicare,” we will follow the reportage and offer Medicare beat memos from time to time. A few weeks ago, Amy Goldstein of The Washington Post gave her readers a short Medicare history lesson. She harkened back...
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August 24, 2012 04:04 PM
A laurel to Jackie Calmes of The New York Times
She begins to X-ray the Romney/Ryan Medicare plan
This week’s laurel goes to Jackie Calmes of The New York Times for reporting the increasing skepticism in health policy circles about claims from the Romney-Ryan ticket that Medicare beneficiaries will be hurt because the president’s health reform law cuts $716 billion from future Medicare spending and puts the savings into subsidies for the uninsured called for by the...
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May 23, 2011 03:02 PM
A Second Look at NY-26
New polls suggest a role for Medicare, but reasons for caution remain
A week ago, I called for more restraint in press coverage of tomorrow’s special election in NY-26, which the press has eagerly framed as a referendum on House Republicans’ controversial plan to turn Medicare into a voucher program. With some new polling data in over the weekend, it’s time to walk back parts of that post — but also to...
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November 15, 2012 01:12 PM
An election post-mortem on Medicare coverage
Coverage? Yes. Guidance? Not so much
In mid-August, when Paul Ryan burst on the scene with his voucher scheme for Medicare, the 47-year old program suddenly became hot news. Until then, the media had paid scant attention to Medicare, except in the fall when they served up some “how-to” stories for choosing new Medicare Advantage plans. This time it was different. Ryan’s plans for transforming Medicare...
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August 16, 2012 02:44 AM
Audit Notes: Bill Black on CNBC, LAT eyes Ryan’s budget, robosigning
The ex-regulator might as well have been beamed in by the Curiosity rover
Bill Black goes on CNBC and shreds Maria Bartiromo and Bethany McLean on whether Goldman Sachs (and others) could and should have been prosecuted for fraud related to the financial crisis: If there's damage in the green room, I'd like to imagine it's from Black banging his head on the wall afterward, yelling repeatedly, "No it's not a great point—it's...
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May 5, 2011 09:08 PM
Audit Notes: CEO Porn; Ryan Avent on Paul Ryan; Sbarro, Cooked
Gary Weiss says the tarnishing of Warren Buffett is a useful moment for the press to stand back and quit the CEO worship. Indeed: The annual "we love Warren" extravaganza long ago acquired many of the aspects of a cult ritual, and we in the media were right there with the shareholders, sipping the Kool-Aid. But this year's Buffett-fest was...
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March 30, 2012 12:21 AM
Audit Notes: Cookbooks and News, Too Big to Fail, Paul Ryan
Ken Doctor has a good post for Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab on why news organizations need to be ramping up niche product development, both for individual sale and as free add-ons to make digital subscriptions worth more. Let’s take one example. On Wednesday, the Boston Globe launched “Sunday Supper & More.” It’s a cookbook. It’s New England. And it could...
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August 21, 2012 06:50 AM
Audit Notes: Fake or real Jeff Jarvis?, Wolf on Ryan, robots and labor
Replacing copyright with something called "creditright"
This may seem like a Fake Jeff Jarvis post, but it's real-life Jeff Jarvis: Creators don’t need protection from copying. That’s futile. Copying can’t be stopped. Thus copying is no longer a way to exploit the value of creation. People don't need protection from stealing. That's futile. Stealing can't be stopped. So what do creators need protected? What are their...
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March 27, 2012 01:40 AM
Audit Notes: Hollywood Rolls, Ryan’s Loopholes, Regulation and Racing
Looking at this Wall Street Journal graphic, you'd think Hollywood has been on some kind of epic roll the last five or six years: All of these movies came out after 2006. Unless ticket sales suddenly became front loaded around that time, this means the numbers and ranking aren't adjusted for inflation, which the Journal doesn't mention in the graphic...
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April 6, 2012 06:14 PM
Audit Notes: Paul Ryan’s Very Serious Budget, The London Whale
Paul Krugman hammers colleague David Brooks today, writing about unnamed commentators "pretending to be moderates or at any rate only moderate conservatives" praising Paul Ryan and criticizing Obama for being mean to him, which Brooks did this morning. Ryan proposes tax cuts that would cost $4.6 trillion over the next decade relative to current policy — that is, relative even...
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August 14, 2012 01:56 AM
Audit Notes: Romney’s Ryan taxes, FDR or Ayn Rand, Morton Mintz
The Atlantic on what would be Mitt's "Path to Prosperity"
The Atlantic's Matthew O'Brien has the best snap financial analysis of Mitt Romney's pick of Paul Ryan as a running mate, reporting that "Under Paul Ryan's plan, Mitt Romney wouldn't pay any taxes for the next ten years -- or any of the years after that." Well, maybe not quite nothing. In 2010 -- the only year we have seen...
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May 18, 2011 03:58 PM
Challenging Newt’s Medicare Walkback
Choice is the least of Medicare's problems
Poor Newt Gingrich! What a beating he’s taken since he said on Meet the Press Sunday that Paul Ryan’s scheme to privatize Medicare was “too big a jump” for Americans, just like Obama’s health care law is. The former House speaker compared Ryan’s proposal to Obamacare, which he said he opposed because it imposed radical change, and he “would be...
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April 25, 2011 01:48 PM
CJR Holds a Town Hall in Philly
Shoppers on Market Street sound off
Finding myself in Philadelphia recently, I decided to stroll along Market Street and see which of the day’s big political issues ordinary people had on their minds. Medicare topped the list, followed by Social Security and job security. The day of my interviews, the Democratic polling firm of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner released results showing that two thirds of respondents had...
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April 14, 2011 01:11 PM
Conservatives Get Colorful on Obama’s Deficit Speech
More subdued libs are mostly pleased
The president’s speech yesterday was notable to my ears for two things: the surprisingly direct attack on Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan and the ideology underpinning it (un-American!), and Obama’s general vagueness on how he would achieve the ambitious goals he set. To be fair, though, it wasn’t as detail-lite as some of his previous orations, and pundits can...
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April 7, 2011 04:07 PM
Covering Medicare, Part I
A mixed performance from the press
Perhaps no other health issue is as important to so many Americans now and in the future as Medicare. Without it, millions of older and disabled people would not get health care. As baby boomers age, they, too, will need the program. The media have not done a stellar job covering Medicare; now that Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan has moved...
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August 14, 2012 11:11 AM
Estimating crowds: size matters
Reporters wrestle with the numbers as Romney and Ryan draw larger audiences
NORTH CAROLINA — The day after Mitt Romney announced Paul Ryan as his vice presidential pick, the two traveled here for a couple of campaign stops, drawing decent crowds. How decent? That’s a good question. John Frank of the Raleigh News & Observer estimated 1,700 people came to see the pair at the NASCAR Technical Institute in Mooresville, with 1,000...
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June 9, 2011 12:49 PM
Jon Huntsman’s Vision for the Future of Medicare
Whose moral obligation is it?
Potential presidential candidate Jon Huntsman’s recent Wall Street Journal op-ed was thoroughly predictable, containing lots of the acceptable phrases for GOP discourse: stuff about not underestimating the “seriousness of the responsibility,” the need to “make hard decisions now,” “reforming entitlement programs,” Paul Ryan’s attempt “to save” Medicare, “the inescapable reality that we have too few workers supporting too many retirees.”...
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