David Morgan
Reuters
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney wants to turn Medicare into a voucher system and President Barack Obama hopes that fact alone will help him win votes among senior citizens and baby boomers.
But health policy experts, including two analysts who first floated the idea of Medicare vouchers 17 years ago, say no such plan is likely to become legislation - let alone law - until after the next presidential election in 2016.
That is because the mere notion of fundamentally revamping the $590 billion-a-year healthcare program, which serves 50 million elderly and disabled Americans, raises a multitude of policy issues that no politician or policymaker has addressed publicly…..No experts in either the public or private sectors of the $2.8 trillion U.S. healthcare system have said in detail how a voucher system might work. The task require better insurance risk-adjustment mechanisms than are available now, as well as a deeper understanding of geographic variations in medical costs.
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