The Choose Medicare Act: How strong is this public option?

The Medicare for America Act, introduced last December by Reps Rosa DeLauro (CT-03) and Jan Schakowsky (IL-09), is a halfway house -- or two-thirds-way house -- to single payer -- and arguably a complete route to all-payer.  This bill (summary here) creates a revamped Medicare that auto-enrolls all children born in 2022; allows employers and employees to buy in; and folds in Medicaid and senior Medicare. It preservers a role for private insurance, via Medicare Advantage and the remaining option for employers to provide private insurance.

The bill would effect a less radical and somewhat more gradual transformation of American healthcare than Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All bill -- but a sweeping, sudden and very expensive transformation nonetheless, undertaking to transform Medicaid, senior Medicare, and long-term care (for which it provides coverage) as well as the individual and employer markets (the latter would be empowered to pay Medicare rates, set at 110% of current Medicare in the new public program). Insurers should be able to ultimately live with it; providers would fight it tooth and nail.

For those more comfortable with more incremental change, the Choose Medicare Act introduced by Senators Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Chris Murphy (D-CT) last April (summary here) has a somewhat similar architecture but does not a) autoenroll newborns, b) fold in Medicaid, c) include long-term care or d) much change senior Medicare, except to add a yearly cap on out-of-pocket expenses to traditional Medicare.  What it does do:

Boehner supports Merkeley's call to score Supercommittee proposals for jobs impact

...only implicitly, of course.

Senator Jeff Merkley, as Greg Sargent has repeatedly broadcast with such enthusiasm, has a modest proposal for the Supercommittee charged with striking a deficit reduction deal:

He is calling on both parties to agree to submit every proposal offered by the supercommittee to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, to be evaluated for the impact it will have — on jobs.

He doesn’t want the CBO to evaluate the proposals just for their budgetary impact. Rather, he wants the CBO to reach a conclusion on the impact the proposals will have on unemployment, whether positive, negative, or neutral.

“We need to have every proposal that the super-committee brings out to have it scored by its jobs impact,” Merkley told me in an interview this morning. He plans to urge Democratic and GOP leaders to agree to this standard, and hopes to build a campaign to make it happen...