A change in the consensus?
by digby
I am very hopeful that this great piece by Ezra Klein will be influential among the pundit class in Washington and give the congressional Dems some ballast. In essence he spells this out in great detail, with graphics and charts:
[Social Security] is not generous enough to counteract the sorry state of retirement savings nationwide. In a report for the New American Foundation, Michael Lind, Steven Hill, Robert Hiltonsmith and Joshua Holland survey this data and conclude that the ongoing debate over how to cut Social Security is all wrong: We need to make Social Security much more generous.
And then this — problematic in some respects, but really radical by establishment discourse standards:
Medicare uses its massive market power to negotiate much lower prices than private insurers. For that reason, the Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2011 that “average spending in traditional Medicare will be 89 percent of (that is, 11 percent less than) the spending that would occur if that same package of benefits was purchased from a private insurer.” Back during the health-care debate, the CBO estimated that a public option able to use Medicare’s pricing power could save more than $100 billion over 10 years.
In a policy paper for the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, Robert Berenson, John Holahan and Stephen Zuckerman propose a package of changes that would save more than $700 billion over 10 years. One of the changes they propose is raising the age of eligibility from 65 to 67. But in order to blunt the impact of that change, they propose letting people between the ages of 65 and 67 buy in to Medicare on their own — that way, they can take advantage of Medicare’s lower prices, even if they’re paying for them out-of-pocket. “Buying into Medicare gives them as good a deal as they’re going to get,” Berenson says.
If it’s such a good deal for the 65-to-67 crowd, then why not let 55-year-olds buy into Medicare, or even let everybody buy into Medicare? “I’ve always assumed it was just political opposition from Republicans,” Berenson replied. I asked him to put aside the politics and just assess whether it would work. “Conceptually, I don’t see a problem,” he said.
Ezra might as well have screamed “No blood for oil!” in the pages of the Washington Post by suggesting that. And good on him. It’s a question that needs to be asked over and over again: if Medicare is the most cost effective system then why don’t we at least offer it to everyone?
Read the whole thing. I don’t know if any of this is doable, but he sure makes a good case for why we should try. Send the link to journalists and other influentials. Maybe this will be the the beginning of the turn-around for the beltway consensus. Let’s hope it’s not too late.
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