Krugman: You can't do health reform in pieces

[johan helge]

Krugman (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/one-legged-stools/):

"As things fall apart on the health care front, one thing you keep hearing is the idea of doing reform in pieces — start with something popular, like banning discrimination on the basis of medical history, then do the hard stuff later.

I have another proposal: let’s save money by making stools and chairs with only one leg.

As I’ve written before, the pieces of reform are interdependent. You can’t do one or two pieces on their own. Ban discrimination based on medical history, and you get an adverse-selection death spiral, in which healthy people opt out and premiums soar. You can’t solve that without both requiring that healthy people buy insurance and helping those with lower incomes afford the premiums. In short, you basically end up with the Senate bill.

Hasn’t anyone been paying attention here?"

[Demeter]

1. Nope. DC is in the Bubble, not the Zone

pay attention to peons? How dare you, sirrah!

[phantom power]

2. As Krugman also pointed out in an earlier post....

all of this is a necessary consequence of not just expanding Medicare For All.

Once they shitcanned single payer, they ended up with this interlocking set of requirements, mostly as a response to the necessity of somehow preventing private insurance companies from behaving like the amoral corporations that they are.

What could possibly go wrong?
:eyes:

[NorthCarolina]

3. Maybe, but you CAN expand Medicare by lowering the eligibility buy-in age

to say 50 or 55 to start, and then lowering the buy-in age incrementally over the next several years.

[flamingdem]

4. +1

[kenny blankenship]

5. Paul, Paul, Paul. Just stop.

They blew it. They haven't been constructing a chair expected to bear anyone's weight since early summer. Now they are in the position of passing nothing after putting the country through a year of debauched lobbyist controlled horsetrading, in which case they look like buffoons who should never be allowed to hold office, much less govern. Or they can pass the miserable result of their efforts and get SLAUGHTERED in the next 2 election cycles. Or they can split out elements of the legislation that people like and pass those separately and throw themselves on the mercy of the people. The fact that these elements will not constrain the insurance racketeers or deliver the benefits their advocates claim for them is of vanishingly small importance to political minds in Washington right now. They are facing extinction. Through their own venality, sloth, and corruption they have double crossed & weaseled themselves right into a trap. Saving a little face is their only way out and the least worst path before them.