Dr. Mark B. McClellan, who was the head of Medicare when the experiment began and is now a policy analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington, says the point of Medicare's experiments is to find out which approaches might work.
In reality, the whole point of Medicare for all would be to wipe away current insurance arrangements and replace them with a new public plan.
Before the August recess, Republican members of Congress were sent home with a script of "talking points" on Medicare that emphasized, according to the New York Times, that the changes they would propose this fall were necessary to "save" Medicare and would give "the elderly the same rights as other Americans,' including the right to choose'" a health plan.
Consider Thomas Scully, who was, until recently, the head of Medicare and the point man in the White House's effort to get its drug benefit through Congress.
Reading the 2005 Medicare Handbook is confusing to the point of incomprehension ("Medicare Will Revise Guide to New Benefits for 2006," news article, May 22).
Critics of bundled payments point to Medicare's experience with a superficially similar approach: the diagnosis-related group, or DRG, payment model.
As health policy expert David Barton Smith points out, the implementation of Medicare in 1966 was deeply intertwined with the implementation of civil rights legislation.
Mark Pauly, an economist at the Wharton School in Philadelphia, points to the example of Medicare, America's publicly funded health-care programme for the elderly.
The paper points out the relevance of Medicare (in the USA) eligibility in labor decisions for individuals over 60 years old.
THE wispy young woman paces at the back of the crowd, nodding incessantly as Al Gore makes another arcane point about the intricacies of Medicare.
