Medicare

The question of whether a new public health insurance plan should be allowed to compete with private health insurance plans has polarized the health reform debate unnecessarily. Extremes from both political parties have tried to use the issue to prevent progress toward a bipartisan health reform package.

But health reform must be bipartisan to be sustainable over time. This means both sides' priorities must be reflected in the policy solution.

Our nation must re-establish fiscal balance as soon as macroeconomically permissible. At this moment, there is no question that we must take substantive steps to stimulate our economy and address the crises in our housing and financial markets.

In fact, I have never seen such consensus in a profession as argumentative as economics. But America's economic and social futures are also threatened by several long-term challenges. First among these is the ever-rising cost of health care.

While 2008 will go down as a year of hope and change in American politics, the collapse of Wall Street and bursting of the housing bubble will probably mean that fear and anger take center stage in the 2010 elections. If so, the most coveted swing voters may soon be the Busted Boomers - individuals 50 and older who placed supreme faith in the financial markets and now find their long-held dreams of a comfortable retirement eviscerated.

About the Collection:

The ever-growing cost of health care is the largest threat to our nation's long-term fiscal future. One way of tackling this problem is by using Medicare-the nation's largest purchaser of health care-as a catalyst for widespread efficiencies in the private sector. Medicare must become a more value-based purchaser to make the Program sustainable over time and incent the private sector toward change. It is imperative that we act decisively and soon. Yet, we believe embarking on a Medicare-only reform effort

"It won't be smooth sailing," predicted Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which wants tough controls to bring down deficit spending and reform expensive programs like Social Security and the Medicare ...

Jacob Hacker, a fellow at the New America Foundation and author of a paper advocating an optional public health plan modeled on Medicare, says the number of ...

On January 11, 1944, in his annual State of the Union Address, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called for an economic bill of rights. The rise of totalitarianism, he said, had taught the lesson that "necessitous men are not free men" because the miserable and the desperate "are the stuff out of which dictatorships are made." According to Roosevelt, "In our days these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of

... 20 years or so," said Jacob Hacker, co-director of the University of California-Berkeley School of Law Center on Health, Economic and Family Security. ...

The report, by health care expert and UC Berkeley professor Jacob Hacker, says a public health insurance plan like Medicare offered together with private ...