Paul Ryan's new budget...

...is such a colossal mess that it's hard to know where to begin. Lowering the top tax rate from 35% to 25%? How about repeal of financial regulatory reform? How about privatizing Medicare? Yeah; that's a good place.

Under Ryan's plan, Medicare as a single-payer system would cease to exist. Instead, seniors would be given "vouchers" with which to buy insurance from private carriers. There's just one problem with that.

(There are actually several. For one, the "vouchers" are not expected to keep pace with rising health care costs. Nifty, huh? Another is that private insurance is more expensive than a single-payer system; health care costs would go up, not down. But bear with me.)

Insurance companies don't like to write policies for people with pre-existing conditions.

And the trouble is, most seniors have pre-existing conditions. (Hard to picture someone willing to sell my 91-year-old mother a health insurance policy.)

So who will sell all these policies to seniors? Will Ryan's plan force private insurers to underwrite seniors with pre-existing conditions? Sounds like a government takeover of the private health insurance industry to me.

What would Paul Ryan's idol, Ayn Rand, say about that?