Marketing Medicare Reform

[Geee]

National Review:


‘Premium support” is at the heart of GOP efforts to modernize Medicare before it evaporates as soon as 2020. Democrats have mutilated this excellent idea, which also bears a dreadful name. House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) and his colleagues should re-launch this concept, pronto.

Republicans should remind mewling Democrats that economists in liberal thinks tanks came up with the idea in the first place. The Brookings Institution’s Henry J. Aaron and the Urban Institute’s Robert Reischauer fathered “premium support” in 1995.


Former senator John Breaux (D., La.) promoted this reform as co-chairman of President Clinton’s bipartisan Medicare-overhaul commission.
“I have proposed a premium support Medicare plan modeled after the health care plan serving nearly 10 million federal workers, retirees and their families,” Breaux wrote in March 1999. “Premium support means the government would literally support or pay part of the premium for a defined core package of Medicare benefits,” he explained. “Today, Congress micromanages Medicare and the government uses fee schedules and thousands of pages of regulations to set prices for specific services. My plan combines the best that the private sector has to offer with the government protections we need to maintain the social safety net.”