This is a short diary, but I wonder if this idea has been considered.
Has anybody thought of rolling healthcare reform and entitlement reform together in this way?
- Allow a wide swath of people to buy into Medicare, say, anybody over 55 and under 65, and any family whose income is equal to or less than five times the poverty level. The rate paid to doctors could be at Medicare rates plus 5% or perhaps a bit higher.
- Apply a tax to the plan to the tune of 2% to 5%. All proceeds from this tax would go to the "free" Medicare for seniors above 65 years.
The benefits of this approach might be:
A. Because of the low overhead of Medicare (about 3%), even a plan that paid Medicare plus 10% and charged a tax of 5% would still be cheaper than typical private plans that spend 30% on overhead.
B. By tying expansion of coverage to paying for entitlements, you might bring a few deficit hawks and entitlement reformers on board to vote for the measure. At least a senator’s resistance to it would be more uncomfortable since s/he would have to come out against a major source of funding toward Medicare solvency. Let's say 50 million people signed up for this plan, and the annual cost of the plan was $9,000. If five percent of that were going to Medicare per year, that would equal 22.5 billion dollars a year. Pretty good, and it's going towards making a very popular program solvent, rather than lining the pockets of CEOs and Wall Street speculators.
C. Might it not pass muster for fifty-one-vote reconciliation since it is a funding measure for Medicare?
D. If it did pass through reconciliation, wouldn’t the five-year sunset and re-authorization be less of an issue because we’d just be five years closer to the impending insolvency of Medicare, and cutting a source of funding for a very popular program would be political suicide?
E. Wouldn’t allowing such a large group of people to use Medicare provide the strength in numbers needed to make a public option viable, while providing the tax base to create some substantial revenue for Medicare?
What do you think? Have I had too much coffee or something?