Public option out!
Instead, Medicare may open to those 55 and older
In a surprise move to appease moderate Democrats, sources say the Obama health reform plan may drop the public option in favor of extending Medicare to the uninsured who are more than 55 years of age, the Associated Press is reporting. Currently, only those over 65 are eligible to receive Medicare.
At a last-minute news conference in the Capitol Tuesday evening, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev) would say only that a “broad agreement” had been reached between liberals and moderates on the issue. The resulting bill is expected to forbid insurance companies to deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions and to reduce healthcare costs in general.
However, dropping the public option is seen as a great loss by those who wish to see healthcare needs prevail over insurance-industry profits. And it seems less likely costs will be curtailed if a purely private health insurance solution is formulated. Currently, about 20% of every healthcare insurance dollar the public pays out goes to insurance industry profits and overhead. The competition provided by the public option was seen as a way to lower these costs and see that more of the healthcare dollars coming both from taxes and individual expenditures would go toward providing actual health care. Medicare overhead costs are generally considered to be between two and five percent, with four percent the most popular figure.
One undoubted benefit of increasing the Medicare rolls is that it will increase the scrutiny paid to Medicare and its benefits. Currently, Medicare recipients are saddled with recent additions to the plan that operate like private insurance or require recipients to sign up for private insurance if they wish to receive, for example, payment for drugs. Some recipients claim that the copays under these plans exceed the cost of many generic drugs purchased directly from a low-cost pharmacy.
Increasing the number of people dependent on the program may increase political pressure to return Medicare more to its single-payer roots.
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