Paul Ryan is desperately trying to resuscitate his failed plan to end Medicare by offering it as the replacement element in the long-sought “repeal and replace” strategy for the Affordable Care Act.

The mission of Stand for Children sounds very good, until you dig deeper. Critics charge that Stand for Children started out on the right side of the issues, devoting itself to progressive issues such as class sizes, affordable children’s healthcare and adequate funding for schools. But then, things changed when they started taking the money, and lots of it— from wealthy interests who arguably care nothing about poor children of color in the inner cities, and care a great deal about a vision of privatization that extracts profit from the public schools.

Ryan’s plan to turn Medicare into an income-based, sliding-scale voucher that seniors use to buy only private insurance on a loosely regulated exchange is nearly identical to the Obama Affordable Care Act’s basic design that gives the uninsured under 65 income-based, sliding-scale vouchers to buy only private insurance on loosely regulated exchanges.

Not only is Republican Paul Ryan’s Medicare privatization plan using basically the same general premium-supported exchange design that Obama’s health care revision does for the uninsured under 65, but both Ryan’s budget and “Obamacare” are nearly totally reliant on almost the same pathetic accounting trick of using poorly indexed caps on federal health care spending in the distant future to produce the bulk of their supposed deficit reductions.

I would love if the entire Democratic establishment could unequivocally beat up on Ryan and the rest of the Republicans for promoting such a horrible plan. Unfortunately, this task has become monumentally more difficult in the last year because President Obama, Congressional Democrats, and the bulk of “liberal” pundits endorsed the new health care law, all claiming profusely what an amazing idea it is to use sliding scale premium support payments to provide individuals with insurance on private exchanges.

Republicans are about to unveil a budget that privatizes Medicare. It ends enrollment to the single-payer program entirely within 10 years, and everybody else who reaches the age of 65 gets a voucher they can use to purchase health insurance on the private market. The voucher’s value does not increase over time even as health insurance rates rise, so it will cover less and less of the cost of insurance. These Medicare-certified private plans, ironically, would live on an exchange, much like the private market in the Affordable Care Act. But two things here: one, the Medicare certification would have no standards like essential benefits, annual limits and minimum guarantees, unlike the vision for insurance exchanges in the ACA; and two, this would cost more money overall, since Medicare is much cheaper than private insurance, similar to all single-payer health care systems. The burden of that additional cost would fall on the individual, as the voucher would stretch less over time.

In a way, the continuing resolution on the 2011 budget is really a prelude. It has dominated headlines because of the immediacy, and the threat of a government shutdown if no deal is reached. That discussion is ongoing, and while agreement has been reached on a level of cuts, where the cuts fall, and particularly the unrelated policy riders, are up in the air. And time is short.

But it’s next year’s budget, not this one, where Republicans will really seek to transform American society and the social safety net, with major changes to mandatory spending programs.