By Jordan Weissman @ Slate.com, Feb. 23
[....] No one serious simply wants to expand the current Medicare program, since it contains some major coverage gaps that today’s seniors are typically stuck filling with private supplemental insurance. When Sen. Bernie Sanders tried to define the term back in December, he proposed a full-fledged single-payer health care system with zero premiums, co-pays, or deductibles. That idea won over more than a dozen co-sponsors, including some other likely 2020 contenders like Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand.
But many Democrats are still clearly concerned that such a rapid move to true, Canadian-style single-payer would risk a backlash from voters, who’d face new taxes and be forced to give up their employer-based coverage, whether or not they wanted to. Those Democrats, which include a big chunk of the party’s wonk class, are still looking for their own answer to Berniecare.
On Thursday, the Center for American Progress—the D.C. think tank of choice for technocratically inclined establishment Dems—took its stab at an alternative with the introduction of “Medicare Extra. ” While the name sounds like an ironic nod at teen slang, the program itself is an interesting blueprint for gradually nationalizing health care without making skeptical voters feel as if they’re being dragooned into the new system [....]