House Dems want Medicare for everyone
House Democrats are looking at re-branding the public health insurance option as Medicare, an established government healthcare program that is better known than the public option.
The strategy could benefit Democrats struggling to bridge the gap between liberals in their party, who want the public option, and centrists, who are worried it would drive private insurers out of business.
While much of the public is foggy on what a public option actually is, people understand Medicare. It also would place the new public option within the rubric of a familiar system rather than something new and unknown.
Rebranding:
The plan, called the “robust” option or “Medicare Plus 5” in the jargon that has emerged on Capitol Hill, ties provider reimbursement rates to Medicare, adding 5 percent. Leaders are planning to roll the bill out next week, and are hoping to vote the first week in November.
Those of us with elderly parents who have had to deal with Medicare are not as thrilled as the Dems. Medicare is broke, and it is yet one more reason why the public option is no option at all to us. Neither is Obamacare.
And a question for you,
If the public option is such a good idea, why resort to re-branding and red herrings?
Are they also planning on no longer referring to dying except as being currently unavailable to answer the phone?
> If the public option is such a good idea, why resort to re-branding and red herrings?
Because of widespread public opposition to it?
This is one of the tricks politicians have long since learned — if you can’t get your programs past the public, rename it, and try again… Since politicians have far more patience with their BS than the public does, it tends to work.
They were trying to get another half-cent sales tax passed here in Florida for a decade, passing it off time and again under different justifications and guises… Eventually they succeeded in many areas, even though they actually had to get the voters to vote on it, because they kept changing the excuse for it and finding something the public would vote for
That it did nothing for that thing is irrelevant — that it just shifted funds away from the thing voted “for” and towards the other thing that got no benefit is something the voters, as a whole, Just Don’t Get.
You give these idiots more money, and they just find more ways to waste what they have.
Government politicos and bureaucrats don’t grasp “prioritizing” your expenses. It’s how it is that, anytime there’s a shortfall, they scream and cry and caterwaul about how they’ll have to “cut essential services” — that is, cops, EMTs, and firemen — because, after all — we all know that’s what ALL the money they get is spent on… right?
Give them more money, they spend it on anything that suits their fancy, regardless of if it’s needed or not.
Next time we set up a government, we need to make everything they pass come at least SOME out of their own pockets — so the more things they vote for, the more it will cost them, personally…. make some “threshold” point — if you keep expenses below 90% of last year, then you don’t get charged any off your salary… but if it’s 125% of last year, you get charged double or triple the surcharge off your salary.
That might teach the $%#%$$#$# bastards what “priorities” mean, AND it will encourage them to reduce budgets from year to year.
Medicare is in trouble because the GOP threw the trojan horse towards privatization of Medicare into the mix with the creation of Medicare Advantage, which is nothing but a complete scam and sucks even more money out of the system. Get rid of that, and Medicare will be just fine.
Also, it’s funny how whenever single payer or Medicare for all is actually scored, it always comes out on top as being the more fiscally conservative option out there. Ask yourself the simple question of why the CBO didn’t score single payer this time around. It’s because the private insurers don’t want the entire public to know that it’s the most cost-effective, BEST way of insuring Americans.
The problem is that the GAO found that Medicare wasted over 32% of its funds via incompetence and fraud. While the corollary for private insurance is around 2%. So when one considers overhead, let’s accept the claimed 3% for Medicare and the accepted number of 15% for private insurance then Medicare is obviously not cost effective. Lately it has been revealed that, due to US media actually studying single payer programs, that they are neither cost effective nor particularly cheap. Especially in England and France where the government subsidies are counted against the general budget and not healthcare.