If Conservatives get their way and the Supreme Court strikes down the individual mandate to buy health insurance, it would be a real victory for them; but in the end, the last laugh may be with actual progressives. While in this case an individual mandate was used to expand health coverage, similar individual mandates are the cornerstone for corporatist plans to unravel the public social insurance systems created by the New Deal/Great Society.

This evening, well-known Social Security opponents will meet with AARP CEO Barry Rand for a private, off-the-record ‘salon’ known as the “E Street Exchange.” Whether or not you’re an AARP member or retired, you should be deeply concerned about these events, because what AARP eventually decides to do will set the tone for debate on Social Security and Medicare going forward. We can’t wait for the outcome of the E Street Exchange to act – we need to make our voices heard right now, and demand AARP end the back-room strategy sessions to prepare the weasel words and misleading data points to advance benefit cuts.

The close call in the House Budget Committee for the Ryan budget led many to wonder whether the House leadership would have trouble with the bill on the floor. But The Hill reports that they’re making progress toward that goal.

Workers caring for our greying population are intimately woven into our family lives, but are alienated from essential labor protections–though that could change soon. As we’ve reported previously, a longstanding loophole in the Fair Labor Standards Act excludes home care or “companionship” workers from minimum wage and time-and-a-half overtime regulations. Nationwide, about 2.5 million home care and personal assistance aides–projected to grow to about 3.8 million by 2020–work around the clock to help their clients handle the basics of life, while often themselves scraping by on poverty wages.

On both sides of the debate over the social safety net, we often see the term ‘strengthening Social Security’ tossed around.

This phrase means different things to different people. As the majority of Americans support expanding benefits, to them it likely means taking a strong position against any cuts or changes that negatively impact their benefits.

But to understand what that phrase means to Wall Street, the US Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable is a very different story.

I love a good provocative title as much as the next writer but it has to at least make some sense, which really doesn’t seem to be the case with Ezra Klein’s new article ‘Ryan May Lead to Single-Payer Health Care.’ As best as I can make sense of the rather strange logic leaps, Klein has basically made yet another total 180 reversal in his previous thinking. He is now arguing that Ryan’s plan, if enacted, would be so bad that at some point in the future it would magically make Democrats adopt single payer.

Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson writes in the WSJ that liberals can’t wait to impose Medicaid on everyone. Apparently he missed the part where many liberals supported “Medicare for all,” but hey, it’s the Wall Street Journal and they’ll print anything from a GOPer.

The Ryan budget has appeared as a chairman’s mark. It’s a long document written in Congress-ese, but I’ve already gone over some of the main points. Here are a couple other tidbits, including why the revenue and spending caps are implausible and the automatic mechanism that requires the President to “fix” to Social Security.

To coincide with Paul Ryan’s release of the House Republican budget, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) put an op-ed up in the Huffington Post to defend creating the Wyden-Ryan Medicare proposal. That proposal has allowed Ryan to claim there is “bipartisan support” for his budget proposals. But it wasn’t Wyden who convinced Ryan to shelve his original plan to replace Medicare; it was the loud outcry from the public.

Paul Ryan’s budget was released this morning. He kicked it off with another pretentious video preview and a somewhat less pretentious and more standard op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Ryan’s budget resolution is similar to last year’s version, which passed the House and went nowhere in the Senate.