Posted by
Defend America on Thursday, December 10, 2009 3:18:59 PM
Medicare sausage?
The emerging buy-in proposal could have costly unintended consequences.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
THE ONLY THING more unsettling than watching legislative sausage being
made is watching it being made on the fly. The 11th-hour "compromise"
on health-care reform and the public option supposedly includes an
expansion of Medicare to let people ages 55 to 64 buy into the program.
This is an idea dating to at least the Clinton administration, and
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) originally
proposed allowing the buy-in as a temporary measure before the new
insurance exchanges get underway. However, the last-minute introduction
of this idea within the broader context of health reform raises
numerous questions -- not least of which is whether this proposal is a
far more dramatic step toward a single-payer system than lawmakers on
either side realize.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/09/AR2009120903902.html