Krugman: Zombies against Medicare

[eridani]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/27/opinion/zombies-against-medicare.html?_r=0

And second, while raising the Medicare age has long been a favorite idea of Washington’s Very Serious People, a couple of years ago the Congressional Budget Office did a careful study and discovered that it would hardly save any money. That is, at this point raising the Medicare age is a zombie idea, which should have been killed by analysis and evidence, but is still out there eating some people’s brains.

But then, Mr. Bush’s real argument, as opposed to his campaign’s lame attempt at a rewrite, is just a bigger zombie.

The real reason conservatives want to do away with Medicare has always been political: It’s the very idea of the government providing a universal safety net that they hate, and they hate it even more when such programs are successful. But when they make their case to the public they usually shy away from making their real case, and have even, incredibly, sometimes posed as the program’s defenders against liberals and their death panels.

What Medicare’s would-be killers usually argue, instead, is that the program as we know it is unaffordable — that we must destroy the system in order to save it, that, as Mr. Bush put it, we must “move to a new system that allows [seniors] to have something — because they’re not going to have anything.” And the new system they usually advocate is, as I said, vouchers that can be applied to the purchase of private insurance.

The underlying premise here is that Medicare as we know it is incapable of controlling costs, that only the only way to keep health care affordable going forward is to rely on the magic of privatization.

[JDPriestly]

1. Fact is that the risk involved in insuring older people with ordinary health insurance

would be so great, and the cost of the insurance that would cover that risk so prohibitively high that it is downright naive of the Republicans to suggest that any system other than Medicare could deal with that risk.

The Medicare system is a necessity, not a choice.

What insurance company in its right mind would want to insure older people for the price that Medicare pays to insure us.

Two things are certain. One of them is death. Healthcare for older people gets more and more expensive as we approach death.

The Republicans are nuts on this issue. They should know better. It's just their free market fanaticism that prevents them from understanding why Medicare is so important, so irreplaceable.

The alternative to Medicare for older people is dying in misery. And I know all about Medicaid funding for nursing care. But many of us will die before we need nursing care. In fact, most of us would prefer to skip the nursing care part of life.