Another Health Care Idea
Because of liberal House Democrats ambivalence and outright opposition from labor unions, the Senate health care bill looks dead. So, are there any other options? Ezra Klein has this idea:
Democrats could scrap the legislation and start over in the reconciliation process. But not to re-create the whole bill. If you go that route, you admit the whole thing seemed too opaque and complex and compromised. You also admit the limitations of the reconciliation process. So you make it real simple: Medicare buy-in between 50 and 65. Medicaid expands up to 200 percent of poverty with the federal government funding the whole of the expansion. Revenue comes from a surtax on the wealthy.
I mean, this would obviously be better than nothing, but it’s not really “reform” in the sense that anyone wants reform. I imagine the most popular part of health care reform, as envisioned in the House and Senate bills, are the insurance industry regulations. Just about everyone supports these. But since a lot of people, intentionally or unintentionally, don’t understand health care policy, we have the weird phenomena where people support the insurance regulations so that coverage can’t be denied because of preexisting conditions but don’t support the mandate and subsidies that have to accompany those reforms. And it’s exactly those two things which have made the health care bill “expensive” and scary and has driven its unpopularity.
