"There is a potential lie-of-the-year in that paragraph. It's just not the one that PolitiFact thinks it found.
The real lie is the claim that Ryan's plan "is necessary because of the programme's soaring costs". In fact, the problem isn't Medicare per se, it's the entire cost structure of American medicine as a whole, which is roughly twice the per capita cost of healthcare spending in other advanced countries - even those that have 50 per cent more people aged 65+ than the US has.
The reason for that cost structure is non-competitive private oligopolies - insurance companies, drug companies, hospital chains, etc., - in sharp contrast to other countries with their government-run systems of various different kinds. There's another name for these oligopolies -they are the cash cows of the one per cent. Paul Ryan is their man, and PolitiFact is part of their protection system.
Indeed, as Thomas Ferguson and Robert Johnson explained just over a year ago, in their paper "A World Upside Down? Deficit Fantasies in the Great Recession", all of the US long-term federal debt is due to just three oligopoly sectors: the military-industrial complex (the backbone of empire, with bases all around the world and almost half the world's military spending), the medical-industrial complex (with twice the per capita costs of other systems), and the financial sector (which has recently cost trillions of dollars in lost wealth and economic activity)."
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