Clinton's Big Step to the Left on Obamacare

• Hillary Clinton is proposing a dangerous expansion of Medicare as a “public option” for health insurance, something even Democrats rejected while writing Obamacare.
• This will raise costs and taxes for all Americans and will drive Medicare into the red even sooner than its already bleak outlook.
• Giving Washington control over more Americans’ health care never improves costs or care – it just makes the programs bigger, when they need to be made better.

Medicare is Already on a Path to Insolvency

Hillary Clinton is promising to expand Medicare to cover people starting at age 50. This would be a way to create a “public option” for insurance. Senate Democrats rejected the idea of the public option as too extreme when they were writing their health care law behind closed doors in 2009.

Medicare is already on a crash course with fiscal reality. According to the Medicare Trustees, the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund will be depleted in 2030. CBO projects that the fund will run out of money even earlier – in 2026. Expanding the program, as Clinton proposes, will only break the bank sooner.

Medicare Trust Fund Headed for Disaster

We’ve Seen This Movie Before

President Obama said that the health care law would bring down costs for American families and the government. Instead, the law increased costs for the typical family, increased taxes, and cut Medicare. Hillary Clinton is now saying we need more of the same. The failure of Obamacare has proven that expanding an entitlement program does nothing to reduce costs and can only be sustained with massive tax increases.

CBO’s latest annual fiscal outlook projected that Washington would spend $104 billion more this year for the major federal health care programs than it did last year – an 11 percent increase. Obamacare’s two most expensive components – the health insurance exchanges and Medicaid expansion – have both turned out to be more expensive than the government expected.

Just since its report last August, CBO has increased its spending projection for Medicaid by $187 billion over the next decade due to higher than expected spending for Obamacare’s expansion of the program. The average subsidy cost for people to buy insurance in the Obamacare exchanges is also higher in CBO’s fiscal year 2016 outlook. According to an analysis by the Mercatus Center, the average Obamacare subsidy rose 18 percent in the past year, to $4,181. As health insurers raise premiums by double digits, taxpayers will have to pay for even higher subsidies.

The spending would be worse if Obamacare were not much less popular than expected. CBO predicted there would be 21 million people enrolled in the exchanges by 2016. Earlier this year, the agency lowered its expectations to 12 million. Obamacare has not lived up to its promises on increasing coverage, and expanding Medicare will not deliver on its promises either.

Medicare Expansion Doesn’t Solve the Problem

Aside from Medicare’s alarming solvency crisis, there is bipartisan agreement that the program has big gaps in coverage for America’s seniors. About 90 percent of seniors look for additional coverage through programs like Medicare Advantage. These policies help cover services that are not covered by Medicare, such as dental care, eye exams, long-term care, and hearing aids. Medicare also has no out-of-pocket limit on what people must pay, and supplemental coverage can protect seniors against surprise costs. Instead of helping to fill in the gaps, Obamacare targeted Medicare Advantage, cutting payments by hundreds of billions of dollars.

Medicare has also been designated as a high-risk program by the Government Accountability Office since 1990 because it is so susceptible to fraud. In 2014, GAO estimated that Medicare made improper payments of $60 billion. Expanding Medicare without fixing its underlying problems would repeat the failure of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. The health care law added more people to a program that had already relegated millions of Americans to second-tier medical care.

We should be looking for ways to fix Medicare so that it can deliver on its promises for generations to come. Hillary Clinton’s promise to extend the program to more Americans will further limit people’s health care choices, increase costs for patients and taxpayers, and speed up the death of Medicare as we know it.