Pawlenty touts Medicare proposal during Iowa trip

Asso­ci­ated Press

WAUKEE, Iowa — Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial hope­ful Tim Paw­lenty told peo­ple dur­ing a Mon­day stop in Iowa that the key dif­fer­ence between his Medicare pro­posal and the pro­posal intro­duced by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wiscosnin, is that his plan will change the way providers are paid.

The for­mer Min­nesota gov­er­nor spoke to a group of about 60 peo­ple dur­ing a cam­paign stop at Point of Grace Church in Wau­kee. He said his plan would include “per­for­mance pay.”

“We will begin to move providers from get­ting paid not just for the vol­ume of pro­ce­dures they crank out, but whether peo­ple are actu­ally get­ting health­ier and get­ting bet­ter,” Paw­lenty told The Des Moines Register.

He also told ABC’s “This Morn­ing” that he would sup­port Ryan’s pro­posal to pri­va­tize Medicare if his only choices were Ryan’s plan or doing nothing.

Paw­lenty, who launched his bid for the Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion last week in Des Moines, had stops planned later in the day in Boone and Fort Dodge. He is sched­uled to visit Sioux City on Tues­day and Coun­cil Bluffs on Wednesday.

For­mer Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roe­mer, con­sid­ered to be another pos­si­ble GOP pres­i­den­tial hope­ful, joined Paw­lenty at the Wau­kee event, lay­ing out a detailed plan to cre­ate jobs by over­haul­ing the nation’s trade, energy and tax poli­cies. He said Amer­ica is addicted to Mid­dle East­ern oil, cor­po­ra­tions that don’t back taxes and spe­cial inter­ests that have cost the nation jobs.

“We’ve stood by and let our best jobs go to China and Mex­ico,” he said. “We are a nation of free trade, not fair trade.”

Roe­mer, who hasn’t offi­cially announced his inten­tions, said he would increase the age for Social Secu­rity by one month each year for 24 years and reduce the national bud­get by 1 per­cent of the gross domes­tic prod­uct over five years.

He also promised that if he runs and wins, he would hold his inau­gural cel­e­bra­tion in Iowa, not Wash­ing­ton D.C.

“I’ll go back to the heart­land, where I started. We’ll dance, eat and drink Amer­i­can prod­ucts,” he said.

Posted by AP News on May 30 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.