Matt Yglesias is evidently not a fan of Rep. Paul Ryan. He describes Ryan as a “fraud,” and he sees Ryan’s effort to convert Medicare into a limited defined contribution towards the purchase of insurance as an arbitrary numerical cap. I’ve written a post about the Roadmap that offers a different perspective, and Josh Barro and I wrote an article for NR that offered Ryan praise as well as criticism. One of our concerns is that the Roadmap might not go far enough:

Unfortunately, the Ryan plan would take an awfully long time to bring the budget deficit back to earth. Again, the public debt would grow as a share of GDP for the next 33 years, peaking at 100 percent of GDP in 2043. Deficits would not fall below 2 percent of GDP until 2051 (for comparison, from 1955 to 2004, the average budget deficit was 1.9 percent of GDP).

But I tend to think the approach to our long-term fiscal future endorsed by the White House is far less promising.

One of Matt’s arguments is that the insurance exchange model in PPACA might one day be used as a tool to reform Medicare. My concern is that the insurance exchange model won’t survive one of the legislation’s many fatal flaws, namely the simultaneous drive to increase competition among private insurers while also encouraging consolidation among medical providers. That’s a discussion that merits lengthier treatment.