Paul Ryan: “I want to calm down a little bit. There has been a lot of shouting around here, a lot of heated rhetoric, a lot of…”

“I want to calm down a little bit. There has been a lot of shouting around here, a lot of heated rhetoric, a lot of hyperbole. Let us just look at a couple of facts. It is a fact that the Medicare actuaries are telling us that Medicare is going insolvent in 13 years. The entire trust fund goes bankrupt in 2036. It is a fact that if we add more money on top of Medicare without doing any reforms, you are going to accelerate the insolvency of Medicare. We can try and speak those facts away, but the fact remains that those are facts. Now, what this Democrat substitute does is it costs over $1 trillion. It accelerates the bankruptcy of Medicare. The basic assumption in this CBO estimate is that every employer providing private drug coverage for the retirees is going to drop it. And why would they not? Why would they not drop it if the Federal Government is going to pay for it all? What the facts are is that this plan is going to accelerate the bankruptcy of Medicare. Now, what are we trying to achieve with the Republican bill? Mr. Speaker, there are parts of this bill that none of us all like. I have my own criticisms. But what we are trying to achieve is not only modernizing this program so it works for today's seniors by giving them cheaper drugs and coverage of drugs, but we are also trying to modernize this program and save it for the baby boom generation.”