The Warden

The JAMA study doesn’t surprise advocates of this “consumer driven” health care. “Medicare fee-for-service is an inefficient way to deliver care,” says James Capretta, associate director of the Office of Management and Budget from 2001 to 2004. “It’s an engine for volume-driven spending.” Cost savings under a full-fledged voucher system would be much larger, he argues, because Medicare Advantage’s modest size has created only “muted competition.”

The Washington Post editorial staff goes after Biden for pledging to ignore a broken system:

Why is this so depressing? Because, as Mr. Biden knows, Social Security is going broke. If “no changes” are made, then by 2033 the program will not be able to pay benefits as promised.

Until recently, coverage of the discussions about entitlements—programs that eventually touch almost everyone—has been has been largely unhelpful, or cloaked in political spin. But covering Medicare (and Medicaid too) is hard. How do journalists cover and clarify the debates about reform without getting too deep in the weeds?

Yet American women should be skeptical of this attack on the GOP vice presidential candidate.  The charge presumes that more than half of the electorate all wants the same thing. And what’s more, it assumes that all women want and need cradle-to-grave government care, no matter the costs to our economy or freedoms.

Some Republican hand-wringers moaned. They failed to consider that Democrats were going to level these charges no matter whom Mr. Romney picked as his running mate. And they ignored the ammunition the party has to turn the issue against Democrats.

I always thought that I was okay with arithmetic. [Paul] can run circles around me, and he is honest, he is straightforward, he is sincere. And the budget that he came forward with is just like Paul Ryan. It is a sensible, straightforward, honest, serious budget and it cut the budget deficit just like we did, by $4 trillion.

No doubt there are many Democrats rubbing their hands in glee in contemplation of reviving some version of the ad that featured an actor playing Paul Ryan pushing a grandmother in a wheelchair off a cliff. But the smarter ones are worried.

When a prudent candidate like Mitt Romney picks someone like Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin as his running mate, it suggests that he felt he held a losing position against President Obama. The theme that Mr. Romney’s campaign has emphasized for months and months — that the president has failed as an economic leader — may have persuaded 47 or 48 or 49 percent of voters to back him, he seems to have concluded. But not 50.1 percent of them, and not enough for Mr. Romney to secure 270 electoral votes.

I’m going to get a lot of hate mail for this article, but it’s a fact that Mitt Romney’s Vice Presidential pick, Paul Ryan, has mostly been a friend to Silicon Valley and the technology industry. Ryan’s voting record has supported better access to high skilled immigrants, an open Internet, crowdfunding for startups, and intellectual property reform. However, his ambiguous stance on net neutrality and proposal to cut science funding leaves a noticeable scuff on his otherwise sterling record.