Medicare is not one glorious socialist panacea, more correctly it’s a massive government/private insurance program that comes in a variety of flavors depending on what option the insured selects. And it doesn’t cover everything, in fact Medicare insureds are having the same problems with “surprise!” bills as everyone else. But Medicare is damn efficient, especially when it’s allowed to control prices. That said, Medicare can and has been ripped off for millions of $$$. Rapidly expanding Medicare would make these shortcomings even worse- Think of it as all the ACA rollout problems multiplied by most of our nations population. And even after a decade or so when those growing pains have gone away, with no remaining competition, what’s to keep Medicare from becoming a bloated overpriced insurer that we have no alternative to?
So clearly, a rapid transition to Medicare For All won’t solve the problem.
What can get us there is tweaks to the system, and not just ordinary tweaks, I mean “demon tweaks”. That’s a term invented by Brit car racers for small inexpensive “tweaks” that greatly increased the performance of a car. In government, many of the big changes for the better of us citizens came not from massive highly publicized legislation like Medicare For All, but instead from “demon tweaks” buried in bills hundreds of pages long.
One of the best legislative “demon tweaks” ever was the language that made it easier for disabled adults over 50 to qualify for Social Security Disability. That change, passed during the last recession, allowed a lot of older workers for whom vocational rehabilitation and further education would be a poor investment to gracefully retire a few years early and open up jobs for younger workers. Our more thoughtful candidates for president are offering a similar “demon tweak”, a “Public Option” to provide access to affordable health insurance for millions who do not have the good fortune of having good insurance through work or other connections.
That’s just one of the “demon tweaks” that can fix our health insurance system without too rapidly forcing everyone into Medicare- For example, Senator Amy Klobuchar is working on legislation that will reduce the minimum bed requirement for Critical Care Rural Hospitals so they don’t have to waste millions on oversized facilities that will never be used to capacity. Throw in some more just plain common sense tweaks like allowing small federal contractors and their employees to buy into the Federal Employee Health Benefit plans and a bunch of similar tweaks to allow all Americans to take advantage of the purchasing power of large health care purchasers and we provide the benefits of Medicare For All and then some while giving consumers more choices in programs that won’t take a decade or more to roll out.
Demon Tweaks… If I can tweak my car, why can’t we tweak our health care for the better?
Sassy Democrat 