Across the country, Main Street Americans are speaking out against a GOP budget plan that would effectively end Medicare.

In taking aim at Medicare, these conservative members of Congress are claiming that they are actually “saving Medicare” from financial ruin and that there is no possible choice other than to privatize the program and throw seniors to the insurance industry. They say this to justify a plan that the Congressional Budget Office says would have the elderly spending the majority of their income on health care.

Yet what Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) — the architect of the plan to end Medicare — and other right-wingers don’t want you to know is that there are actually numerous way to shore up the fiscal solvency of Medicare that wouldn’t involve such a dangerous privatization scheme.

ThinkProgress has assembled three different policy options that, if enacted, could help Medicare’s future financial issues and save the taxpayer billions of dollars:

1. Empower Medicare To Negotiate For Lower Drug Prices: One policy option that would be very simple to enact and would not require any sort of increased spending or expansion of government would be to simply allow Medicare to use its bulk purchasing power to negotiate with drugmakers for lower prices. The program is currently banned from doing so, thanks to the clout of the drug industry. Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) estimates that doing this could save as much as $156 billion over 10 years.

2. Allow Drug Reimportation From Canada: One of the major costs in the U.S. health care system that drives up the costs not only in the private sector but also among Medicare are the costs of prescription drugs. One very easy was to greatly relieve this cost is to eliminate protectionist barriers and allow the free importation of prescription drugs from our neighbors like Canada. A failed measure proposed by Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and John McCain (R-AZ) to do exactly that in 2009 estimated that doing so would save consumers $80 billion over ten years.

3. Globalize Medicare: Another protectionist barrier and detriment to free trade in the U.S. health care system is that seniors currently aren’t allowed to use their Medicare insurance system outside of the United States. An alternative to this would be to drop these trade barriers and allow seniors on Medicare to seek care abroad, where services are much cheaper. Economist Dean Baker estimates that if fifty percent of Medicare beneficiaries opted for this globalized option, then taxpayers would save more than $40 billion a year by 2020. President Obama dismissed this option when asked about it at a recent town hall meeting.

The primary reason these three common sense initiatives have not been enacted in the United States is because of deep opposition from the drug industry, for-profit hospitals, and other medical-industrial complex interest groups. Yet they all present simple and effective ways to lower costs and help shore up the finances of the Medicare program. If Ryan and other so-called reform advocates were serious about ensuring the fiscal solvency of the Medicare program and lowering health care costs for Americans, they would not remove these options from the debate.

As ThinkProgress has been reporting, conservative members of Congress are facing a backlash across the country as Main Street Americans, outraged by a GOP budget that effectively ends Medicare, speak out.

At a town hall earlier this week in Montana, Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-MT) began comparing the plight of every day middle class Americans like those at his town hall with his own economic circumstance. He droned on about how he’s ‘struggling’ as a small businessman. A constituent asked him what his own net worth is and he said he’s “land rich and cash poor”:

REHBERG: I’m a small businessman. My wife is a small businessman. She hasn’t taken a salary in ten years as a result of business. We’re struggling like everyone else. With the ecnoomy.

CONSTITUENT: What’s your salary?

REHBERG: I’m land-rich and cash-poor. Like ranchers and farmers and small businessmen throughout Montana. [...]

Watch it, via MontanaDemocrats:

While Rehberg calls himself poor and complains that he’s struggling, the fact is that he is, as of 2009 records, the 14th richest member of the House of Representatives. Opensecrets.org estimates that his net worth in 2009 was $31 million. If he’s struggling on that, one has to wonder if he’s really a good arbiter of what’s fair for Main Street America.

Outside of a few regular occurrences, sports and politics generally don’t mix. Elected officials sometimes toss out the first pitch of a baseball game, make friendly wagers with other elected officials, and attend iconic sporting events, like the Army-Navy football game or the World Series. And, of course, there are the obligatory visits to the White House by various sporting champions.

But sports figures, particularly well-known sports figures, tend to stay out of the partisan political spotlight. After all, both Democrats and Republicans like sports, so delving into partisan political debates is generally a recipe for disaster. But this week, Texas Tech football coach Tommy Tuberville didn’t just plunge himself into a partisan political debate — he dove headlong into the biggest debunked conspiracy theory in American politics, coming out on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s show as a birther:

HANNITY: He (Obama) could just get the birth certificate and it’d all over and I’m just curious why he wouldn’t do that?

TUBERVILLE: We’ve got enough controversy in this country, I don’t know why he wouldn’t just step up and say here it is.

HANNITY: Move on.

TUBERVILLE: Obviously there’s got to be something on there that he doesn’t want anyone to see. I don’t understand it. I’m an American. I don’t understand why we just go through this. I think it just continues to divide the country.

Why Hannity brought on a college football coach to talk politics is still unclear. What is clear, however, is that the supposed “controversy” over President Obama’s birth certificate is no controversy at all. The next day, Obama released his long-form birth certificate, which he obtained from Hawaii through a special request in an effort to put an end to birther nonsense. But even before the official long-form was released, the birther conspiracy had been debunked by numerous sources, including the president himself.

Thursday, Texas Tech officials refused to comment about Tuberville’s appearance on the show, and the coach himself has remained silent.

Meanwhile, Tuberville had already drawn the ire of the university’s faculty and staff after getting a $500,000 a year raise while the school was facing budget cuts. Surely, those same faculty and staff members will be thrilled to know that the most visible representative of the school is actively pandering to a conspiracy theory based on racism.