So the plan is to cut insurance for the elderly -- to provide insurance to kids?

[LiberalHeart]

The LA Times has a story about how cuts to medicare will finance this "popular" move to get kids insured:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-kids26mar26,0,1236304.story?coll=la-home-headlines

[Vinca]

1. I'm puzzled by the focus on kids. Of course they need to be insured,

but what happens if their mother or father becomes ill? Aren't the parents of the child as important as the child? The child and his insurance could end up in foster care because mom and dad were uninsured. How about we insure everybody???

[OhioChick]

2. Good Point. n/t

[LiberalHeart]

4. And that is exactly what I can't figure out. Aren't we all important, regardless of age?

[papau]

3. lies in headline award to this one - "medicare managed" equal insurance company run and

excessive cost plans that have folks that, if moved to regular Medicare could get the excellent care provided by Medicare, and if they want, by buying a supplemental ins. policy, could get those frills that apparently are important to them - so important to them that they have already decided to take a cut back in basic Medicare standard coverage so as to use those monies to get things like minimal drug coverage or whatever that actually have minimal value compared to what they have already given up.

This is the Bush con game of "market forces" which means pulling massive insurance company profits out of our Medicare taxes, leaving less for all in terms of real care.

and this great idea is called by the LA Times:

Insuring children may squeeze seniors
Congress debates cutting payments to Medicare managed-care plans to help provide coverage for millions of children.
By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Times Staff Writer
March 26, 2007

WASHINGTON — The Democratic Congress, eager to do something that would be popular with voters, is moving to provide healthcare coverage to millions of uninsured children this year, but there's a catch: Senior citizens enrolled in a popular Medicare program may have to help pay the bill.

That could turn what started as a feel-good plan to help the children of the working poor into a tricky exercise in shifting generational burdens. Such trade-offs may soon become a central theme of American politics, experts say, because the federal deficit is large and the bills for supporting baby boomers in retirement are about to start coming due.

"The budget squeeze is on, and in some ways this is the first salvo," said Adam Carasso, an analyst at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan policy research group in Washington. "It's getting to the point where you are going to have to ask the dreaded question: Is it children or the elderly?"

He added, "The way we have allocated our spending, it's coming down to an either-or proposition."<snip> http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-kids26mar26,0,1236304.story?coll=la-home-headlines