The potentially great Medicare reform that could have been

From Avik Roy, “Saving Medicare from Itself“.

In 1997, as a result of the Balanced Budget Act, Congress organized the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare, under the leadership of Democratic senator John Breaux and Republican representative Bill Thomas. The commission’s final recommendation, supported by members of both parties, was that Medicare should be converted to a “market-based Premium Support model” similar to the one used in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program.

Under the commission’s proposed system, retirees would have been able to choose between private health plans and a traditional government-run fee-for-service plan (a consolidation of Medicare Parts A, B, and C). Thus traditional Medicare would have become one option among many, competing for business. Regardless of what option they chose, beneficiaries would have been expected to pay a premium equal to 12% of per capita health costs, but would have paid no premium at all if they bought a plan that was at least 15% cheaper than the average one. In addition, the commission recommended increasing the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67, in harmony with Social Security.

After the commission made its proposal, President Clinton made a counter-proposal, shaped in large part by his Treasury secretary, Lawrence Summers. He proposed “managed competition” for Medicare, in which private insurers would have engaged in competitive bidding for health coverage of the elderly. Retirees who chose plans that cost less than the average bid would have retained three-fourths of the savings. Clinton also proposed new subsidies to encourage employers to retain private-sector health coverage for their retirees, taking some of the burden off of Medicare.

These two sets of proposals were, in many ways, quite compatible. Indeed, according to historian Steven Gillon, President Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich, along with several prominent Senate Democrats, were close in 1997 to a historic agreement for reforming Medicare along these lines. But after the Monica Lewinsky scandal erupted in early 1998, Clinton was focused on defending himself from impeachment, and this required currying the favor of ideological Democrats over pragmatic ones. Thus no serious effort was made to bridge the various reform proposals, and Medicare’s problems went unresolved.

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