Reply #50: There is a ready made base of customers [View All]

[Ms. Toad]

if they would bother to start the program immediately, rather than phasing it in over a 4 year period that doesn't begin until 2013.

The easiest thing to do would be to just open up the Medicare plan to private individuals on a paying basis (with subsidies for low/middle income). The exchange is already set up and running, including a public option (part A/B of traditional medicare). Private insurance can fend for themselves in terms of setting premiums, and the premium for the public option should be relatively easy to set using an age weighted costs from the current care and administration costs of Medicaid and of traditional Medicare.

It isn't as if acting as an insurance company is something the government hasn't been doing for a few decades. The data is available, and may take a couple of years to get it perfect, but there is no reason they can't be pretty close using existing data.