Paul Ryan on the Urgent Need to Save and Strengthen Medicare

http://budget.house.gov/SettingTheRecordStraight/Medicare.htm Medicare is one of the most important programs we have. It's one of the most successful programs we have. Medicare's in trouble. Medicare is going broke. CBO tells us in nine years it's exhausted its trust fund. We need to save Medicare. This Budget doesn't change anything for anybody on Medicare now or within ten years of retiring, and it saves the system for the next generation. Contrary to what the President proposed yesterday, he wants to delegate more authority to 15 people, on a commission, on a bureaucracy, that was created in his new health care law, to do price-controlling and rationing of Medicare for current seniors. He wants these 15 people -- without consent of Congress -- just to do it directly: to impose more price controls and more limitations on providers, which will end up cutting services to current seniors. We repeal this agency. We don't think Congress should be delegating this kind of power and authority to unelected people to make unilateral decisions on seniors' health care. We preserve, protect and save Medicare for current seniors and those ten years away from retiring and then I'll get into the details about how we save it for future generations. Mr. Speaker, at the end of the day, this budget is about choices. We do four things. We want to grow the economy so we create jobs and have a climate for job creation with tax reform. We want to save the mission and preserve the mission of health and retirement security, we do that. We want to preserve our social safety net and make it more sustainable, more reliable, more adaptive and more conducive to the 21st Century, and geared not toward keeping people on welfare but getting people back on their feet and into jobs and into careers to have flourishing lives. And at the end of the day, Mr. Speaker, what this is really about is giving our children a debt-free nation and with that, I'll reserve the balance of my time.