A very revealing article is currently appearing on Health Affairs. This article is a devastating indictment – by three second-string leftists — of both the left’s failing 5-year-old healthcare financing program for the poor and the left’s failing 50-year-old Original Medicare program (which was — at least initially — for seniors). This article also features the most tortured circular lefty logic I have ever seen.
Follow these leftists’ proposal in detail.
- 1. Our healthcare financing program for the poor, particularly for the working poor, is failing. So let’s give the working poor access to our failing healthcare financing program for seniors instead.
- 2. But… Our healthcare financing program for seniors – Original Medicare – actually provides fewer benefits and worse financial protection than our healthcare financing program for the poor.
- 3. So… “(Original) Medicare… plans would have to provide the essential benefits of (our healthcare financing program for the poor) and meet other requirements…, so the benefit packages—perhaps at the gold and silver levels—(of this new proposed Medicare for the poor) would need to be different from the (benefits) Medicare offers to seniors… (today).”
- In other words, we realize that today the left’s Original Medicare program is basically a Tin Plan on the current law’s Bronze-Platinum scale. The left’s Original Medicare is terrible insurance, with lifetime and per-incident limits on benefits, no catastrophic coverage, no out of pocket spend limit, and many other problems (lack of drug coverage, which is mentioned, is the least of the left’s Original Medicare’s problems). Original lefty Medicare is so bad that 98% of the people who use Original Medicare have to buy two, three or more mostly private insurance policies to actually be… you know… insured.
- 4. So… Instead let’s give the poor the Republican’s 20-year-old Medicare program, Medicare Advantage (see Note), and ruin it too. Oh by the way, the current Bronze-Platinum program of healthcare financing program for the poor, which has failed, is pretty much a copy of the Republican’s Medicare program, which is successful because it is designed for seniors.
- 5. So… Return to Point 1.
NOTE: The term Medicare Advantage is a government artifact and most beneficiaries of a public Part C Medicare health plan, of which Medicare Advantage is only one of multiple types, would not see the term Medicare Advantage on a card, promotional document or other policy document they are ever likely to look at. However the words “Medicare Advantage” do appear (or should) in the fine print of the 300-page Evidence of Coverage document, if their Part C plan is a Medicare Advantage plan
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