Medicare expansion more costly, less coverage, with no out-of-pocket caps

Like putting Grandma on the Titanic.

Ed Morrissey, Hot Air: What’s not to like about the idea of expanding an entitlement program that is already speeding towards collapse, mainly because too many people are entering it already? As it turns out, plenty — and even the New York Times has noticed. It has higher premiums, none of the out-of-pocket caps that private policies have, and will attract a pool with much higher risk, driving costs of premiums and services up, according to a former Medicare trustee:

Marilyn Moon, a health economist and former public trustee of Medicare, said that for people 55 to 64, Medicare premiums could be higher than premiums charged by private health plans.

Health policy experts said that the people who chose to enroll in Medicare were likely to be heavy users of health care, with higher-than-average costs.

Moreover, Ms. Moon noted, private plans would have large numbers of healthy people under the age of 55, whose premiums could help cover costs for those 55 to 64. “Such cross-subsidies would not be available under the new Medicare option,” she said.

All of that would be a burden to a program on sound financial footing. That certainly doesn’t describe Medicare. It’s the worst of the entitlement nightmares, about eight times larger in unfunded future liabilities than Social Security, and it’s been a net-deficit program for years. Thanks largely to Medicare in its current form, federal spending on it will go from 4% of GDP in 2007 (roughly 20% of that budget) to 12% of GDP by 2050.