THE BLOG LINE: 55 -- Too Young for Senior Discounts but Perfect for Medicare

As Senate Democrats continue their seemingly endless negotiations over a public health insurance plan, a new proposal has been added to the mix that would, among other things, allow people between ages 55 and 64 to buy in to Medicare. The idea, aimed at gathering the support of liberal Democrats who want a robust public plan in the chamber's health reform bill (HR 3590), would be added alongside a proposal to allow the federal Office of Personnel Management to negotiate the terms of a public plan with private insurers and contract with not-for-profit groups to run the program. Of course these are just ideas, but they are enough to get the bloggers fired up.

In her "requiem for the public option," Jill Lawrence of Politics Daily calls the Medicare proposal "especially appealing" because, among other things, "it's simple and clear and it already exists." According to Lawrence, the plan "is a public option, but people don't need a definition or an inoculation against claims that it's socialism."

Jonathon Cohn on The New Republic's "The Treatment" writes that "making Medicare available to older workers earlier would seem like a smart move, as policy (by helping people who genuinely need the assistance) and politics (by giving a particularly skeptical age group more reason to value reform)." He adds that it would "bring the public option debate full circle" because originally the idea was to create a program similar to Medicare. "And what's more like Medicare than Medicare itself?" he asks.

About the new proposal to have OPM negotiate terms of a plan with insurers, Robert Laszewski on the "Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review" writes that if the "latest version of the public option is something that will give its proponents reason to argue they still have a way to 'make the health insurance market much more competitive,' then a motor scooter is a Ferrari." He adds that the "notion that adding the OPM to the equation … will somehow drive costs down even further is hard to understand."

Ezra Klein says that all the compromise over the public option "is increasingly becoming a health care reform compromise, and the focus is returning, usefully, to the goals of the bill." He notes that "the intense attention to the increasingly weakened public option had begun to distract from the need to improve other elements of the legislation."

-- by Julia Moss, staff writer