Senate Democrats cause me to reach for my Pepto Bismol
This could be so simple. We can provide a safety net for all Americans. Medicare for all. Unfortunately, life isn’t simple. Whenever you get 50 or more folks together with newspaper reporters and cameras and people’s jobs at stake, it isn’t that simple. So we’ve been playing around with the public option. Remember, the public option is a watered-down version of what most progressives want, a single-payer program like Medicare for everybody. The public option seems to be too liberal, too expensive… too something for some Democrats. So tonight a compromise has been reached.
Older Americans between the ages of 55-64 can buy into Medicare. Details of this buy-in remain somewhat sketchy. The buy-in seems to start in 2011. This will be available to everybody within the age restrictions who are also under 150% of the poverty line. Also, there appears to be an extension of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan. This plan will be allowed to enter the exchange if insurance companies don’t create a nonprofit insurance plan for it. Remember that the exchange does not start until 2014.
These new proposals will send the Congressional Budget Office back to the drawing board. They need to come up with cost estimates before the Senate is able to proceed.
I’m sorry, but this just looks like garbage to me. Let’s tweak this and let’s hope that that somehow we get decent health insurance coverage for everyone. It’s not going to work. The whole thing is too piecemeal and too complicated. Medicare for all… what is so hard about that?
Update:
The NY Times Prescription blog has some more details:
But Democratic aides said that the group had tentatively agreed on a proposal that would replace a government-run health care plan with a menu of new national, privately-run insurance plans modeled after the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program, which covers more than eight million federal workers, including members of Congress, and their dependents.
A government-run plan would be retained as a fall-back option, the aides said, and would be triggered only if the new proposal failed to meet targets for providing affordable insurance coverage to a specified number of people.
The agreement would also allow Americans between age 55 and 64 to buy coverage through Medicare, beginning in 2011.
Great, the compromise for a strong public option is even more private plans. That triggered, maybe public option could be the public option Reid said was still in there. If it’s an extremely robust public option, and the trigger is set at a level that could really be triggered, well, it’s silly to speculate on that because the ConservaDems would never have agreed to that.
A Senate leadership aide tells me that “there is a public option in the compromise,” but won’t be able to provide more details until it is scored by the CBO.
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Tom Degan
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Tom Degan
