House Republicans on Friday released their legislation to extend the payroll tax cut, reform and extend unemployment insurance, and delay changes to the Medicare reimbursement rate for doctors.

In 2008, when it was first conceived, the Toxic Asset Relief Program (TARP, now simply referred to as "the bailout") was supposed to save jobs across the economy -- not by bailing out banks but by solving the problem of toxic assets, the mortgage-backed securities at the heart of the financial crisis. This did not mean handing taxpayer dollars to banks. At the time, Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), then the chair of the Senate Banking Committee, called the proposal "stunning and unprecedented in scope and lack of detail." He went on, "It would allow the Secretary of the Treasury to intervene in our economy by purchasing at least $700 billion of toxic assets. It would allow the Secretary to hold on to those assets for years and to pay millions of dollars to hand-picked firms to manage those assets." Notice that there is no mention of a bailout: the focus was not banks but toxic assets anywhere in the system.

When Paul Ryan introduced his proposal for converting Medicare into a system of "premium support," he reminded everybody that it closely resembled another Medicare proposal—one he'd developed with Alice Rivlin, the Brooking scholar and former Clinton Administration advisor. "Alice Rivlin is a great, proud Democrat," Ryan said. "This path to prosperity builds upon those Ryan-Rivlin plans that we put in here."

Based on what we know so far, the Republican plan for Medicare would appear to be one part hypocrisy and one part con.

Republicans have spent much of the last two years attacking President Obama and the Democrats for cutting Medicare spending, as part of the Affordable Care Act. Now those same Republicans appear to be proposing cruder, deeper cuts that would, for all intents and purposes, destroy the program.

The publisher of The Wall Street Journal went to court yesterday seeking to overturn a 31-year ban on the release of records about how much Medicare money individual doctors receive.