Even though apparently Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson are now bad-mouthing a deal that at least Nelson was in the room to help make, Jacob Hacker was in the news last week endorsing the Medicare Buy-In. Hacker being pretty much the Godfather of the Public Option. The complete interview on this (including others) is here on the PBS website, but this piece from Hacker is important:
Well it certainly is a broad compromise, but I think it’s a complex one. It has a lot of moving parts and a lot of details we don’t know yet.
The way I would describe it is, in sort of Dickensian terms, is it’s a tale of two public options. Public option one, the public option that was going to be within the exchange and available to Americans on day one to create competition for private insurance plans to give people a choice, that public option has been replaced, in my mind, with an inadequate substitute, a national system of private plans.
But public option two, which was never on the agenda before, a buy-in to the actual Medicare program for 55- to 64-year-olds, is an enormous positive development. It’s actually the original idea, if you will, for the public option, simply letting people get into the Medicare program that provides broad, secure coverage at an affordable price.
The ability to buy in to Medicare is not a new idea and people like Howard Dean had picked it up as recently as the 2004 election to campaign on. And Hacker is clear that he doesn’t think that the nationwide nonprofit does any good, either. But the details of Medicare Buy In aren’t all available yet, either, and without knowing how this works exactly it is hard to tell how good of an opportunity this might be.