Socialized Medicine: The administration's own health department, warns of rising costs, shrinking benefits and a long-term health care "death spiral." "Reform" has been pronounced dead
When even the liberal Washington Post warns that congressional Democrats, in trying to save their increasingly unpopular health reform bill, are sneakily making it more like European-style socialized medicine, it means the death watch is on.
Letting 55-year-olds "buy in" to the fiscally doomed Medicare program "could be a bigger step toward a single-payer system than the milquetoast public option plans rejected by Senate moderates as too disruptive of the private market," the Post wrote last week.
The key reason: "sicker near-seniors ... might assume, with good reason, that the government will be more accommodating in approving treatments, and they might flock to Medicare. That would raise premium costs and, correspondingly, the pressure to dip into federal funds for extra help."
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