Never mind that it's hugely expensive for older individuals, private insurers, employers and states, and that it's the "the single worst idea for Medicare reform," it's the low-hanging fruit and the president seems to want it. And thus, the idea hatched by Sens. Joe Lieberman and Tom Coburn is the thing House Democrats are recommending discussing (see update): raising the Medicare eligibility age.
Ways and Means Democrats described two dozen policy changes in a memo prepared ahead of the supercommittee's quest for roughly $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction.
The biggest-ticket items on the Ways and Means list are, of course, the most politically charged. Raising the Medicare eligibility age to 67 could save about $125 billion over the next decade, according to the committee's summary. But the document warns that "raising the Medicare eligibility age would be a radical departure from current policy and is only possible if the (healthcare reform law) is retained."
President Obama proposed raising the Medicare eligibility age as part of the debt-ceiling agreement, but Democrats are hardly united behind the policy.
This is what it would do:
And remember this?
That tiny blue sliver, that's what it
saves, "a mere 0.9% of total program spending [...] what we save will be wiped out by predicted spending increases in the program in under two months."
Just brilliant. Disastrous policy, disastrous politics and self-defeating to boot. Shifting costs that then balloon onto the private health care system will only increase costs in the health care system and will work directly against any cost-curve bending the Affordable Care Act might achieve. Do these Democrats actively want to fail?
Let's hope that the "hardly united" Democrats in the House and Senate can put the kabash on this dog of an idea.
11:19 AM PT: In discussions with a Ways and Means Democratic staffer, who stresses that this was a "cataloguing of options available, and not an endorsment of any of them."