Mother of All Death Panels

The mainstream media can't say enough about how courageous Republican Rep. Paul Ryan is for proposing killing Medicare.

Make no mistake, that's what his plan would do. It's not cutting Medicare. It's getting rid of it altogether. Senior citizens would get a voucher to go buy private insurance, except the voucher wouldn't cover the cost of the coverage they now get through Medicare and it wouldn't keep up with cost increases.

Seniors, who are in big need of medical care as they age, will have to either go without medical care or try to find the money to pay for it themselves -- even as the state of Michigan plans to heap more taxes onto them, by the way.

A few months ago, any tinkering with health care was seen as rationing care, creating government "death panels" that would decide who would live or die.

Ryan's plan is the mother of all death panels. There will not be dramatic decisions, like Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer cutting off coverage for transplants and leaving 100 people to die who had been promised life-saving treatment.

Instead, there will be millions of individual decisions made each day. People will go without needed procedures because they can't afford them. As a result, they will die one, two, or three years earlier than they would have otherwise. Nobody but their families will notice.

Rich people, of course, will do just fine. Which is kind of the whole point of Republican policies.