Was the Medicare Buy-In Just Defeated?

[Damocles]

We have that now its called Medicaid.

The problem is the people in the donut hole that don't get covered and can't afford their own. They aren't poor enough for help and not rich enough to be able to solve the problem. Expand that program and then work towards the cost solutions and we'll have a winner.

 

[DamnYankee]

The problem is the people in the donut hole that don't get covered and can't afford their own. They aren't poor enough for help and not rich enough to be able to solve the problem. Expand that program and then work towards the cost solutions and we'll have a winner.

You mentioned that you want a program that won't give the incentive to suck the gov-teat. Medicaid does just that because you have to be filthy poor to use it. Government should provide a safety net not a hammock.

 

[Damocles]

You mentioned that you want a program that won't give the incentive to suck the gov-teat. Medicaid does just that because you have to be filthy poor to use it. Government should provide a safety net not a hammock.

Yup. You expand it, but with costs. A "buy-in" that incentivizes ultimately leaving the program without incentivizing remaining poor. Hit the pocketbook. The best option would ultimately cost more than private care once you have reached the point where you could pay for private care.

If you couple that with options that are structured towards the users (catastrophic only coverage options for the young and impervious for instance), and freeing it up so you can purchase across states lines and you've solved about half of the cost issues.

 

[Chapdog]

why doesn't Lieberman want medicare buy in? would it be lost revenue to the insurance industry hes responsible to protect in CT?

 

[DamnYankee]

[1]Yup. You expand it, but with costs. A "buy-in" that incentivizes ultimately leaving the program without incentivizing remaining poor. Hit the pocketbook. The best option would ultimately cost more than private care once you have reached the point where you could pay for private care.

[2]If you couple that with options that are structured towards the users (catastrophic only coverage options for the young and impervious for instance), and freeing it up so you can purchase across states lines and you've solved about half of the cost issues.

1. I don't see how a plan that makes the poor pay more is viable politically by either Party.

2. We already have plans like that, created under Bush and conveniently ignored by the Democrat Party. They are called Health Savings Accounts.

 

[Bonestorm]

why doesn't Lieberman want medicare buy in? would it be lost revenue to the insurance industry hes responsible to protect in CT?

Because a bill would pass with it and he doesn't want any bill to pass. As for why he doesn't want a bill to pass, well, he's a dick.

 

[SmarterthanYou]

There’s already something like 80 million people on government health insurance. Are Rontards seriously going to base their campaign and ideology on abolishing medicare, SCHIP, and Medicaid? There’s not a single court in the land that will agree with you’re assessment that single payer healthcare is unconstitutional. To continue to assert it’s unconstitutional makes you look like a fringe Lyndon Larouche whack job.

this is what I love about liberal idiots. Their belief that as long as the courts say it is constitutional, it is therefore constitutional.

tell us cypress, did you feel that dred scott was constitutional? cruikshank? kelo? wickard v. filburn? gonzalez v. raich? Michigan Dept. of State Police v. Sitz?

do you, in your ideological idiotopia, truly believe that every scotus decision is in compliance with the constitution?

 

[SmarterthanYou]

You mentioned that you want a program that won't give the incentive to suck the gov-teat. Medicaid does just that because you have to be filthy poor to use it. Government should provide a safety net not a hammock.

the downside to that is it leaves those just above the poverty line SOL

 

[FUCK THE POLICE]

I think we should offer a bare-bones government paid option for those who can get no other option. No boob jobs, no transexual changes, no optional rubbish, optional abortions right out (almost no insurance that I know of pays for optional abortions).

I have no problem with it so long as it is designed to give incentive towards getting off the public teat rather than incentive towards moving to the public teat.

Damo, what insurance provides boob jobs and sex changes?

I want universal subsidization of insurance policies. Ironically, you are arguing against this, when your plan would obviously would be wealth redistribution while mine would just be societal risk pooling.

 

[FUCK THE POLICE]

Yup. You expand it, but with costs. A "buy-in" that incentivizes ultimately leaving the program without incentivizing remaining poor. Hit the pocketbook. The best option would ultimately cost more than private care once you have reached the point where you could pay for private care.

If you couple that with options that are structured towards the users (catastrophic only coverage options for the young and impervious for instance), and freeing it up so you can purchase across states lines and you've solved about half of the cost issues.

If you freed up purchasing across sate lines, all the insurance companies would move to Mississippi and sell from there. Without new federal regulation it's just the mother of all deregulations.

And, honestly, how fucking difficult is it to set up an office in another state?

 

[Damocles]

1. I don't see how a plan that makes the poor pay more is viable politically by either Party.

2. We already have plans like that, created under Bush and conveniently ignored by the Democrat Party. They are called Health Savings Accounts.

Again, you structure it. As people make more they pay more. You incentivize towards better private coverage by making it so when they make enough to buy private coverage it is more expensive than the private coverage incentivizing them to move off the public teat.

Say a person is below the poverty line, they pay nothing. A person barely above the poverty line pays $1, a person nearly at the line where (by cost of living in each area Medicare is driven by the states) they can afford to buy private will be paying almost what private costs, a person who has crossed that line can continue to stay on this bare bones system at a high cost or they can buy the better coverage cheaper from the private system....

Anyway, it allows for the donut-hole to gain some coverage as well as to incentivize work towards getting off the bare-bones system...

 

[Damocles]

If you freed up purchasing across sate lines, all the insurance companies would move to Mississippi and sell from there. Without new federal regulation it's just the mother of all deregulations.

And, honestly, how fucking difficult is it to set up an office in another state?

It would allow people to select coverage that best suits them, and no they wouldn't all move to Mississippi. Many people like the current ones they are on companies like to sell people what they like, that way they keep buying it. And it is far more difficult to "set up shop" in different states than you pretend here, there is a reason that there are so few companies that are doing it and it isn't because they just choose not to do something that is "easy"... 50 different regulative bodies make it more expensive and it becomes cost problematic unless you are a massive corp, like the ones that offer service in most of the states....

Corporate welfare that forces people to buy into the current system with no cost benefit isn't the way to make it so everybody is covered...

 

[Epicurus]

More on this:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/12/14/democrats-butt-heads-health-care-plan-huddle-obama/

Democrats Furious at Lieberman as They Huddle on Health Care

The entire Democratic Senate caucus is headed to the White House on Tuesday afternoon to talk health care with President Obama, just as the administration urges Majority Leader Harry Reid to cut a deal with Sen. Joe Lieberman, who is emerging as the skunk at the party for supporters of the massive package to create a new entitlement.

Lieberman opposes a proposal that would expand Medicare for people between the age of 55-64. Lieberman has also said he would oppose a government-run insurance option and on Sunday said that Senate leaders need to scale back the bill, removing both provisions from the final product, in order to get his vote.

Congressional staff familiar with negotiations said the White House is strongly urging Reid to work with Lieberman to eliminate the Medicare provision.

But Reid and other Democratic lawmakers are said to be furious that Lieberman publicly called for the elimination of the proposal before members received an analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office on the cost of such a plan.

Clearly inundated by calls to his office and a general backlash against his boss, a Lieberman aide told Fox News, "I want to emphasize, he would like to vote for a bill. He's not opposed to health care reform."

Democratic senators are meeting Monday night on the health care bill, and many are expected to voice their annoyance at Lieberman, the self-styled "independent Democrat."

"There are some people who are going to really want to get some frustration at Joe off their chest," one senior Senate Democratic aide told Fox News.

Sen Tom Harkin, D-IA, has conceded that the public option, once a top priority for him in healthcare reform, and Medicare buy-in are gone from Senate legislative efforts.

"It's not fair but it's reality," Harkin said, of the move precipitated by an announcement by Lieberman, D-CT, that he would oppose the healthcare bill if those two items remain in it.
Some leadership aides said they thought Lieberman might not show up at the Monday night caucus meeting, but a Lieberman spokesman told Fox News the senator is likely to attend. Lieberman has said in the past that he will not attend purely political meetings.

The senator's senior aide said Lieberman's views are no surprise to Reid, who knew of the concerns as early as Thursday. According to the Lieberman aide, the senator's staff told negotiators last week, when the Medicare buy-in was developed, that he had problems with it. Lieberman sent a letter to Reid on Thursday and restated his concerns on Friday.

"It should not come as any surprise to the leadership what the senator's concerns were. Any contrary suggestions by Democrats under the cloak of anonymity are false and self-serving," the aide said.

The aide added that the senator does want to vote for a health care reform bill and sees "much good" in the existing bill, including insurance market reforms.

Lieberman, the aide said, sees the expansion of Medicare as "unnecessary" and "redundant" since Reid's original bill "already addresses the issues of access (with federal subsidies) and cost control."

His consistency on the issue came under question within hours, when House Democrats circulated a videotape from September in which he spoke favorably of allowing men and women as young as 55 to purchase coverage under Medicare.

Marshall Wittman, his spokesman, said those comments were made before the Senate health care bill, which includes health insurance subsidies, was finalized. He said Lieberman believes the government assistance makes a Medicare buy-in program redundant.

White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer said the president is not involved in the internal squabble between Lieberman and the majority leader.

"The White House is not pushing Senator Reid in any direction. We are working hand in hand with the Senate leadership to work through the various issues and pass health reform as soon as possible," Pfeiffer said.

But White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, who would not characterize the nature of Obama's involvement, said he's closely involved in the talks.

"The president is not agnostic to continuing to making progress on health care reform and trying to get it through the Senate," Gibbs told reporters Monday. "The president's been involved.
We wouldn't be sitting here the 14th of December, when you'd much rather be Christmas shopping, discussing the Senate being in on the weekends if the president wasn't involved. The president's been involved the whole time."

And congressional aides said the White House absolutely is urging Reid to make a deal though to say so is bad form in the minds of the Senate leadership.

After his Sunday show appearance, Lieberman met privately in Reid's office with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, a fixture on Capitol Hill these days as health care reform gets hammered out, along with other key White House aides.

Even with anger directed at Lieberman -- echoed with far less diplomacy in the liberal blogosphere -- the caucus is fractured on a number of topics within the overall reform effort, and Obama must pull his former colleagues together around his top priority else risk the failure of the effort.


Some members have expressed varying degrees of skepticism about the bill in its current form, including the newest form of the so-called public option that's currently awaiting the CBO analysis.

The CBO could report as early as Tuesday on the cost of the Medicare proposal. A negative report could cost Reid the vote of Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill.

Gibbs said he doesn't want to get ahead of the reporting since "CBO had told you all before that legislation bends the cost curve, the legislation would slow the growth rate in health care spending, that the health care legislation wouldn't add to the deficit but it would in fact help our fiscal situation. ...

"In terms of the specific policy, again, that's what the CBO is evaluating. And I think many on Capitol Hill await what they have to say," he said.

Lawmakers are also at an impasse over an amendment by Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., that would allow for the importation of cheaper drugs from an approved list of countries like Canada.

The Food and Drug Administration has taken a stand against the measure, and as a result, a handful of Democratic senators are blocking the Dorgan amendment. Dorgan in turn has said he will hold up all other action on the bill until he gets a vote.

 

[DamnYankee]

Thank God for Joe. He's got balls.

 

[signalmankenneth]

Medicare is a public option

Let's hope so.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Weblogs/TWSFP/TWSFPView.asp#14431

Did the Medicare Buy-In Just Die on Face the Nation?

On Face The Nation, Sens. Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson made it pretty clear they weren't inclined to support the Reid "compromise" featuring a Medicare buy-in. Nelson said he thought such a buy-in is a bad idea, and Lieberman noted that on "the so-called Medicare buy-in -- the opposition to it has been growing as the week has gone on. Though I don't know exactly what's in it, from what I hear I certainly would have a hard time voting for it because it has some of the same infirmities that the public option did."

Reid might be able to arrange to get a jerry-rigged Congressional Budget Office score Monday or Tuesday that seems acceptable (the preferred way of doing this so far has been to have the legislation feature ten years of (alleged) spending cuts and (real) taxes and pay-ins, and then only five or six years of benefits). But it sounds as if Lieberman and Nelson aren't willing to play along with the notion that the way to save Medicare is to expand the number of subsidized, adversely-self-selected people in it.

But who's going finally to just say no? There must be a dozen moderate and/or red-state Democrats who would love for Reid's bill to die, but it's hard to be the one who definitively goes first. Lieberman and/or Nelson could do it. Or it might be that the easiest way for everything to collapse in the next couple of days would be for a gang of six (or whatever) to emerge--say, Lieberman, Nelson and Blanche Lincoln, and John McCain, Olympia Snowe, and Judd Gregg--who would agree to work together in the new year on bipartisan legislative efforts to pass sensible incremental reforms with substantial bipartisan support. Word leaking out of one meeting of such a group would put the Reid legislation out of its misery.

If moderate Democrats could say in good faith that the failure of Reid's bill now doesn't mean there won't be health care reform this congressional session--and there's no reason they shouldn't be able to say that, as there would be huge pressure on both parties next year to deliver something--then Democrats would have an easier time breaking ranks. Indeed, they could say such an outcome would be more in their party's, and their president's, interest, than jamming though a startlingly unpopular and incoherently bloated piece of legislation on a party-line vote. And they would be right.

Medicare is a public option

By DAVID L. GOLDMAN Guest Columnist


Published: Saturday, December 12, 2009 at 1:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Friday, December 11, 2009 at 5:53 p.m.

I attended the Democratic Club of Sarasota's dinner on Sunday, featuring U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, and read Jeremy Wallace's subsequent account in the Herald-Tribune. It seems to me that Wallace buried the real story by emphasizing differences between Democrats on Afghanistan rather than the incredible unity among all Sarasota Democrats on health care reform.

On the way to the event, I was approached by about a dozen conservative protesters holding up signs decrying President Obama as a socialist. Although they were emotional and a bit unhinged, I politely listened before asking how many in this group were on Medicare; almost all were, in fact, Medicare recipients.

I pointed out that Medicare is a government-run health care plan and is exactly the type of "socialized medicine" that they were protesting. The group became agitated, proudly noting that they pay Medicare premiums and were not getting a "handout" from the federal government.

Yet the "public option" which most Democrats see as the cornerstone to real health care reform is no handout either. I tried to explain that all their fellow citizens want is to be able to purchase reasonably priced health insurance just as they do. The problem is that the only option for the rest of us is to pay sky-high premiums to one or two giant insurance companies that control the market and place profits ahead of people, which is their right.

Unfortunately, without a strong public option (like Medicare), there is no regulation or competition to keep the cost of health insurance reasonable.

Even worse, coverage is often canceled for those who become seriously ill, as sick people who need expensive medical care soon become unprofitable.

It is normal for any for-profit business to seek to avoid financial losses. This is precisely why a "public option" is so important. It is the only way to ensure quality health care while keeping insurance premiums affordable and competitive, just as with Medicare. Except that, unlike with Medicare, the pool of those who would be insured would be younger and healthier than those over the age of 65.

While Wallace correctly noted disagreement among Democrats regarding Afghanistan, almost all acknowledge President Obama's earnestness in grappling with this difficult issue, and the lack of any good policy options.

This is quite unlike health care reform, where poll after poll shows that a majority of Americans continue to favor the creation of a robust "public option" (like Medicare) that would be available to struggling families who cannot pay $15,000 a year for health insurance that can be canceled at the exact moment they need it most.

Inside the event, the unity among Democrats was palpable. All of the speakers addressed core values of fairness, empathy and social justice.

I only wish that those values would transcend party lines and reach those whose negative, knee-jerk opposition to the public option and our president prevent them from keeping an open mind on the critical issues that confront our nation.


David L. Goldman is an attorney who lives in Sarasota. E-mail: dgoldman@getmejustice.com