Or maybe, they don't believe it because it isn't true.
http://www.cbo.gov/publication/43023
Medicaid and Children's Insurance is still 1 and 1/4th GDP in 2030
Yes, "Medicaid and SCHIP" are 1.25% of GDP, compared to 5.7% in current projections. How does he do this? Reforming insurance? Bringing down physician payments? Negotiating better prices on drugs? No he does none of these. In fact he has absolutely no program in place to ensure that these programs function.
Medicaidand S-CHIP refer to a pair of program by which the states receive federal funds towards the healthcare of the young, poor and disabled so long as the state have programs in place that help these groups sufficiently. Ryan eliminates both of these programs and replaces them with "block grants." The block grants are just money transfers to the state without all that pesky needing to actually provide essential care to the citizens. So he removes the funding for this law (the states can use the much smaller block grants as they please.) He removes the targets of this law. He removes the legal and administrative structures. All he does is appropriate the name for another program that achieves nothing resembling the same results.
The other remarkable thing about Ryan is that he can do completely shameless maneuvers like this and people actually believe him just because he uses fig leafs like keeping the names while eliminating the policy. People actually see that he proposes a 79% cut in funding for a program and think he is being realistic. That is despite not advancing a single notion on how to actually bring down the total cost of healthcare. In fact by moving towards less effective negotiating structures he would actually increase the total cost of this healthcare. The only "good" thing about this change is that it would shift costs onto the poor paying out of pocket so as to free up money for more tax cuts for the rich.
Don't piss on my boot and tell me it's raining. And don't repeal Medicare and S-CHIP and tell me that they're preserved despite having no funding or targets.
Let me try this by metaphor because those always work so well.
Suppose you work for a company which requires you to drive around a lot for work so they have a policy of giving you a rental car for your work. Now one day they decide to cut costs so they take away your rental car and give you a buss pass. In a sense that's keeping the policy of providing your transportation. It's a really crappy downgrade but they are still providing a modicum of transportation. Well that's not equivalent to what Ryan is doing. What Ryan is doing is like taking away your rental, giving you a yearly bonus and then making that yearly bonus rapidly decline in size with every passing year.
Hey, maybe you prefer your bonus. Maybe it's even a better policy in the long run. But it means that your company is no longer involved in providing you with transportation.
Ryan is doing something like the rapidly diminishing bonus. He keeps the names "Medicaid" and "S-CHIP" but they are no longer programs related to insurance healthcare is available for the poor, young and disabled.