Simon Lazarus thinks that Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) proposal to require future retirees to purchase coverage from an exchange of private insurers is reminiscent of the dreaded individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act. “[T]he Republicans’ proposal to replace Medicare with partially subsidized private insurance also operates to ‘compel’ people to pay for private health insurance policies. Moreover, this mandate is not even a pay-or-play option; Medicare taxes are mandatory, whether workers want to buy eligibility for old-age vouchers or not.” As Ezra Klein explained it, “If you decide not to use the voucher, or the voucher is insufficient, all the taxes you paid into the system are forfeit. Either you buy insurance as a senior, or you face a tremendous lifetime tax penalty.”

Some conservatives have tried to defend Ryan’s plan from the comparison, but it turns out that the congressman agrees with it. During a town hall in Racine, Wisconsin on Friday, Ryan — who has previously opposed the measure — admitted that his plan includes a mandate:

Q: If Medicare becomes a voucher program, would you require seniors to purchase private insurance and if so isn’t that an individual mandate? If you will not require them to purchase insurance how do you propose to prevent a situation where the costs of uninsured seniors is very expensive and gets passed on to me as a private policy holder? [...]

RYAN: Its mandate works no different than how the current Medicare law works today, which is you just select from a wide range of different plans. It literally would be like Medicare Advantage…

Watch it:

All this tells us is that the mandate isn’t some horribly coercive policy aimed at usurping individual freedoms. Rather, it is a mechanism by which government attempts to encourage more individuals to purchase coverage and expand the size of the health care risk pool, thus spreading the costs and risks of insurance across a larger population (and bringing down health care costs). It’s simply asking able individuals to take personal responsibility for their health care expenses and it’s something Republicans have supported in the past and (apparently) still favor.

Last night, the Washington Post suggested that despite overwhelming approving Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget just last month, Republicans may be slowly backing away from one of the plan’s most controversial and unpopular provisions: transforming Medicare from a guaranteed benefit into a “premium support” voucher for future retirees. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) said that Republicans would “press for all the provisions in the Ryan proposal” during negotiations with Democrats and insisted that “the starting point is the Ryan budget,” but hinted that the party could be open to taking the Medicare changes off the table. “But Cantor said negotiators could avoid the ‘big three,’ which Democrats have vowed to defend, by focusing on changes in other areas. “If we can come to some agreement [and] act to effect those savings now, this year, it will yield a lot of savings in subsequent years,” he said. This morning, the Huffington Posts’ Sam Stein reported that House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI) would not hold hearings on Ryan’s budget:

Camp also threw a bit of cold water on the Medicare reforms included in Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) proposed budget. He said that legislation to turn Medicare into a voucher system would likely not get a hearing in his committee.

“I’m not really interested in just laying down more markers,” said Camp. “I’d rather have the committee working with the Senate and the president, focusing on savings and reforms that can be signed into law.”

“I don’t think we can afford to wait,” he added, “I think we needed to make progress now.’

This represents a change in tone and a departure from how Ryan himself has characterized his plan in town halls across Wisconsin and to national audiences. Speaking to ABC’s Christiane Amanpour on Thursday (for a segment that ran this Sunday), Ryan said that if Republicans don’t push boldly forward with his proposal, they deserve to be voted out of office:

AMANPOUR: And now people are getting worried, people in your party. Perhaps they might think it might even cost them the election. [...]

RYAN: Look, literally, Christiane, if all we fear about is our political careers, then we have no business having these jobs. If you want to good at these jobs, you’ve got to be willing to lose the job.

Despite the bold rhetoric, the GOP’s plan has been met with strong opposition and the party may now be trying to distance itself from Ryan’s proposal. In the past two weeks, as congressmen went back to hold town halls in their districts, a major constituent backlash ensued. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has repeatedly said that he is not wedded to Ryan’s plan and some GOP presidential candidates have also remained weary. Newt Gingrich, has said he would back a slightly more moderate version of Ryan’s Medicare plan and former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty (R) is also refusing to endorse the Ryan plan.

A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that “more than twice as many voters oppose efforts to change Medicare than those who favor limiting benefits.” Even after being told that told that “Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid and defense comprise 60 percent of the federal budget,” 70 percent of voters said they were against reducing benefits while just 27 percent supported it.

Yesterday, in a vote of 251 to 175, 16 anti-choice Democrats joined every House Republican present to pass H.R. 3, the No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act. The measure prevents women from using “itemized medical deductions, certain tax-advantaged health care accounts or tax credits included in last year’s health care law to pay for abortions or for health insurance plans that cover abortion,” essentially excludes statutory rape-related abortions from Medicaid coverage, and forces women to prove, if audited, that the abortion “fell under the rape/incest/life-of-the-mother exception, or that the [tax subsidized] health insurance she had purchased did not cover abortions.”

The GOP’s abortion push seems to undermine its pledge to focus on economic issues like job creation and deficit reduction — matters that received the greatest attention in the party’s Pledge to America and throughout the 2010 campaign. In fact, a ThinkProgress review of floor statements from the last two months suggest that yesterday’s effort to expand abortion restrictions undermines promises made just two months ago:

- REP. DAVID SCHWEIKERT (R-AZ): “There is not a meeting that I have as a freshman with members of leadership where jobs, job growth, economic growth isn’t the first, second, and third priority.”

- REP. DAVID DREIER (R-CA): “Our goal is to focus on job creation, economic growth.”

- REP. JOHN CARTER (R-TX): “If there is one thing we gotta do more than anything else we gotta do, for now and for the foreseeable future in this Congress, is help take down barriers and get the entrepreneurial spirit going again.”

But during yesterday’s vote, Republicans flipped, insisting that “there is nothing more important than protecting voiceless unborn children and their families from the travesty of abortion.” Watch a compilation:

As Tanya Somanader reports, some Republicans have suggested holding the debt ceiling increase hostage over the passage of H.R. 3. Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) — the main sponsor of the legislation — has said that, “all options are on the table but that he has not settled on a specific strategy for moving the bill.” The measure is unlikely to pass as a standalone in the Democratic-led Senate, even though a companion has now been introduced. President Obama has also threatened to veto the bill.