December 26th, 2008
The Medicare decision made in 2008
My story on the fading prospects for Medicare Part D was the sixth most popular story at this blog during 2008.
(Medicare Part D gave us the “donut hole,” a range of costs where coverage disappears for a time, before re-appearing later.)
My title was stark. Medicare bargains going away. The news peg was a Congressional decision to cut subsidies for Part D and not cut them on standard Medicare, which was taken in September.
Those who read the story argued a lot about socialized medicine, but that’s a train which left the station years ago. Ronald Reagan called Medicare socialized medicine back in the mid-60s. It passed and is still with us.
You need Java for this link, but the story is an old one. Americans pay more for health care, per capita, than in any “socialist” country. But our life expectancy is on a par with Cuba.
Obviously there are other ways of looking at the data. You can divide it by income, and find that wealthy and near-wealthy Americans do live as long as citizens of other nations. Their per-capita costs are even higher than the average.
Poor Americans, and increasingly middle class Americans, are living far more Hobbesian lives – nasty, brutish and short. The model of modern American health care is a Latin one, an aging elite under seige from a young proletariat.
The 2008 election showed most Americans don’t want to become like Brazil, or Mexico, but have a more European outlook. How will that inform health care policy in 2009?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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