The last vestiges of the “public option” have apparently been stomped out in the Senate version of healthcare reform:
WASHINGTON — Just the thought of Joseph I. Lieberman makes some Democrats want to spit nails these days. But Mr. Lieberman, the Connecticut independent, is not the least troubled by his status as Capitol Hill’s master infuriator — and on Monday he showed how powerful that role can be at a time when Democrats cannot spare a single vote.
The day before, Mr. Lieberman threatened on national television to join the Republicans in blocking the health care bill, President Obama’s chief domestic initiative. Within hours, he was in a meeting at the Capitol with top White House officials.
And on Monday night, Democratic senators emerged from a tense 90-minute closed-door session and suggested that they were on the verge of bowing to Mr. Lieberman’s main demands: that they scrap a plan to let people buy into Medicare beginning at age 55, and scotch even a fallback version of a new government-run health insurance plan, or public option.
Let’s recap what has occurred so far in this round of attempts to reform healthcare. We haven’t moved closer to a single-payer system. We haven’t moved closer to “socialized medicine”. We haven’t reduced healthcare spending or even nudged the “cost curve” anywhere but up for the foreseeable future.
We are, apparently, determined to provide insurance for a relatively small number of people, nothing approach universal coverage, at a very substantial cost. Any lives saved by such a strategy will more than be made up for by those lost as a consequence of our determination to spend more on healthcare.
We still haven’t addressed the pressing business of returning to something resembling fiscal sanity and that will be impossible without reducing healthcare spending. We’ve just moved the day of reckoning a little closer.
Yay! I love government!
Ah well. To be honest, lately I’ve been thinking that Medicare will probably have to self-destruct before we actually get back to a serious proposal on the drawing board. It’s just a mountain in front of any effort in the form of massive existing spending covering a costly segment of society, combined with the voter clout to dampen or kill efforts to cut it.
EDIT: ” . . and to reform it.”
Okay, lets think about this. Medicare implodes. When that happens we will likely have an implosion in the entire health care market. We saw the financial melt down and the resulting recession, the worst since the Great Depression. What do we think will happen when the Health Care industry implodes?
The system can go a lot longer. We will just see Medicare become means tested and/or we will see the income limits raised on payroll taxes. Thus, Medicare can go for quite a while. Both parties cave to the old folks lobby.
The crunch will come for those below 65. Fewer and fewer businesses will cover health insurance. That means anyone with a pre-existing condition will not be able to get insurance. Ima thinking that somewhere between 20-30% of people w/o insurance will start a major populist movement. A big chunk of those uninsured now are illegals and those going bare by choice. That makes it easier to ignore them. Gets harder when real people are dying.
“Yay! I love government!”
Yes. If only we had a better way to make things work.
Steve
You don’t think I know that? As I said, it would “clear the air” a bit, providing an opening towards more serious reforms. It’s an ugly situation to be stuck in, but in the US reforms generally don’t seem to happen until things have gone significantly downhill.
That’s the problem, when you give a group of people power over the rest it usually has a corrupting influence.
No, I don’t. I don’t think it will “clear the air a bit” I think it will be worse than anything we’ve seen before.
Oh and means testing medicare is equivalent to taxing the elderly with more wealth. Not sure that is going to get too far.