A voucher by any other name is still a voucher, Mr. Ryan

DuffyInk cartoon.

There is a campaign underway to rewrite recent history -- and Paul Ryan's Medicare voucher plan -- and pretend Ryan propose something called "premium support," which, we're told, is now attracting some Democratic support.

Ryan was right after all, the story line goes. One conservative even thinks that progressives owes Ryan an apology for dumping on his plan.

Kevin Drum sets the record straight in his Mother Jones post:

It's a free country and Paul Ryan can call his plan anything he wants. But that doesn't make it so. The fact is that liberal wonks didn't object to Ryan's plan because it included premium support, they objected to it because it's not premium support. It's a voucher with a very slow rate of growth that (a) does very little to actually rein in healthcare costs and (b) within a couple of decades would leave seniors paying enormous out-of-pocket expenses for medical care. It was that stingy rate of growth and unwillingness to tackle cost growth that turned off liberal wonks from the start. There are still plenty of us willing to support variations on genuine premium support plans that genuinely try to rein in medical costs and insure that seniors can continue to receive reasonable care at a reasonable price.

So I think I'll hold off on any apologies for now. Paul Ryan's plan was never either serious or courageous. It was a meat axe designed to get him applause from true believers and headlines as a "bold" thinker. But if he ever does get serious, I imagine he'll find plenty of support from liberals. We've been there for a while.