Jacob Hacker does a great job of making a rather radical health care reform seem like common sense. Speaker Pelosi (knock on wood), please read this article:
The biggest problem with American health financing is not that employers sponsor coverage. It's that employers decide whether workers get coverage at all. So, why not give employers the option of providing low-cost coverage to their workers through a new public program modeled after Medicare? If employers want to provide comparable private coverage, they can. But if they don't provide basic insurance, their workers should be automatically enrolled in the new Medicare-like program.
A few years ago, I developed a proposal along these broad lines, and it has been extensively analyzed by the Lewin Group, the leading private firm that does cost and coverage estimates for groups developing reform plans. The Lewin Group's estimates show that if employers were allowed to purchase public coverage for their workers by paying a modest wage-related premium, roughly half of Americans younger than 65 would be in the new Medicare-like plan and the other half would remain in private insurance. Small and low-wage firms would generally see benefit in signing up for public coverage. Large and high-wage firms would be more likely to continue to provide coverage on their own. All Americans with direct or family ties to the work force would be guaranteed affordable coverage, at a cost of just under $110 per person in increased health spending. (The unemployed would be signed up through state unemployment offices or through outreach efforts run by hospitals and public-assistance programs.)
Didn't Congressman Matt Santos (aka Jimmy Smits) propose something similar on The West Wing?
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