What happened to Tommy Thompson? I heard he was a moderate…

In the video above he talked about doing away with Medicare and Medicaid.

The key quotes:

change Medicare and Medicaid like I did (to welfare) and who better than me, who’s already finished one of the entitlement programs, to come up with programs to do away with Medicaid and Medicare

Let’s block-grant what the state has, and allow the states to determine what’s going to go into Medicaid.

Now you’ll note in the first quote, he does talk about replacing Medicare, with another program. Since Mr. Thompson supports Paul Ryan’s voucher plan, this very likely means voucher coupons instead of Medicare. Vouchers are a bad deal because they are subject to market forces, which means if costs go up, maybe a person won’t be able to afford healthcare. In addition, a voucher coupon would decrease the ability of government to use Medicare’s purchasing power to negotiate for better prices on healthcare services. The move to Medicare vouchers is clearly the first step into weakening the senior healthcare and could even lead to it being basically ineffective.

The second quote, can you imagine having 50 different Medicaid programs in each state, all changing And it’s far easier to change policy at the state level than at the federal level. Can you imagine the Medicaid programming changing with every change to state government?

No wonder Mr. Thompson is down in the polls.