Reps Kucinich and Weiner! One more amendment, please!

[eridani]

We have two election cycles to get through before anyone at all notices any improvement in health care delivery, assuming any meaningful bill is passed. Insurance companies will continue to jack premiums, people will still lose jobs and coverage, employers will still reduce benefits and constantly change their preferred provider lists, etc. The majority who don't pay a lot of attention to policy wonkery will be highly susceptible to Repuke and MSM arguments that Dems passed a big, messy expensive bill that hasn't changed anything--and it won't have until 2013.

UNLESS-- the Kucinich ERISA waiver remains, giving states the option of implementing single payer. (The Weiner amendment allowing a floor vote on single payer is going to fail, but it will help us to see who our real friends are.)

OR-- we can get an amendment allowing anyone to buy into Medicare, or at least allowing some people to buy into Medicare. The obvious advantage is that Medicare is already a going concern, and will not have to be invented from scratch like the exchange and the public option. The original Medicare was implemented within a year, and this proposed amendment would just expand it. It could be implemented fast enough to provide visible benefits to a critical mass of people.

I urge you and everyone to write to Kucinich and Weiner and ask them to propose such an amendment, as they are the single payer advocates who have demonstrated a willingness to amend the current bill.

Dennis Kucinich [phone]; [phone]
Anthony Weiner [phone]; [phone]

AND--it would be way cheaper, too. See http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x6423577

[BzaDem]

1. This is more fantasy.

States are not going to enact single payer, with or without such an option. They don't have enough tax revenues and they don't have access to the printing press. Only the federal government would have the financial ability to do that.

Allowing people to "buy into Medicare" will be no different than a public-option that provides Medicare rates. Even the progressives in Congress have already agreed to conceed that (and instead have the public option bargain with healthcare providers) in Waxman's committee.

[eridani]

2. With single payer, they would gain revenues from premiums paid into the system--

--instead of to insurance companies. Also, CA has passed single payer twice already in the legislature.

Buying into Medicare will damned well too be different. It can be implemented right away, as opposed to after two election cycles. The public option, regardless of whether it is any good or not, is a disaster in waiting simply because of the delay.

[BzaDem]

3. The delay is not because it is hard to set up.

The delay is essentially a mathematical trick to make the bill deficit neutral over 10 yeras. The tax increases on high-end health plans and the cuts in reimbursements from Medicare will take effect immediately. The benefits won't start for a few years. Because of this disparity (10 years of additional revenue but only 6 years of benefit to the people), a bill that otherwise would not be deficit neutral can now be deficit neutral over 10 years.

If you want to start the public option now (the same as allowing people to "buy into Medicare"), you would run into the same problem of it not being deficit neutral.

And as for allowing states to have single payer, single payer is not a system that you can voluntarily join by paying premiums. That is a public option. Single payer is where everyone MUST be in the system and the funding comes from mandatory taxes. I doubt a state would even try to raise taxes the 8-10% that will be required to fund a single payer program. It isn't politically feasible in this climate.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

4. Why wouldn't it HELP Medicare to add younger healthier people

to the pool?

Also, Minnesota has a single-payer proposal in the works. Again, it works by taking what is now paid to insurance companies.

[BzaDem]

5. I'm not saying it wouldn't help Medicare to add younger people.

I'm just saying that it is essentially equivalent to having a public option. If a public option fails to pass, you aren't going to convince the Congressmen that voted against it to vote for it just because you give it another name.

Whether or not Minnesota has a proposal "in the works" doesn't change how single payer works. Single payer is financed through a mandatory tax increase, by definition. A program financed through another method would not be called single payer. The tax increase that would be required to pay for healthcare for everyone in a state would be gigantic and politically infeasible.

[eridani]

6. You need to read the post on costs of Medicare buy-in vs public option setup

I posted the link. I missed the taxes on high end health plans--if that is the case, we've just lost unions for donations and doorbelling in 2010 and 2012. I thought that the tax was a straight income tax surcharge independent of insurance?

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

7. Hmm... The Kucinich Wiener Amendment.

I'm sure that's something we could all get behind.