Schakowski Plan Would Benefit From Addition Of More Medicare-Related Hand-Waving

Representative Jan Schakowsky is both smart and a dogged progressive, so it's no surprise that her alternative proposal to the Simpson-Bowles debt reduction plan contains a lot of smart, progressive ideas. But what it does—balance the budget by 2015—is basically irrelevant. As you've probably heard a dozen progressives say a thousand times, the long-term budget gap is primarily about health care costs. And while Schakowsky has some ideas in there that provide a one-time reduction in health care costs (public option for ACA exchanges, for example) but there's nothing on the systemic growth in Medicare.

Of course Simpson-Bowles doesn't really have anything on this either. Instead they have a vague assertion that costs should be held to GDP+1% through some unspecified measures. So I guess it's fair for Schakowsky to play by those rules too.

That said, it's the coping with Medicare part that we could really use a commission for! Unlike Social Security, this doesn't call for a brute quantitative compromise where progressives want X and conservatives want Y so we meet somewhere in the middle. I think it would serve the country well to appoint a real panel of experts—not politicians, but policy folks, though ideally ones with some experience in government—and have them devise and evaluate a whole bunch of different options. There's probably nothing that would take a big bite out of Medicare that the 112th Congress would agree to, but the point is that we could really use mores public discussion of the main options—firmer price controls, more means-testing, more rationing.