Happy 45th birthday, Medicare

The prospects for health care reform seem to be dimming.  If I were a progressive I would be wondering right now whether Medicare was a tactical mistake.  The passage of Medicare meant that most old people get government-provided health care coverage.  Yet the way to get things done in this country, politically, is to get old people behind them.  Further health care reform doesn't now seem to promise much to old people, except spending cuts on them. 

The newly passed health care law will boost the financial strength of the nation's massive Medicare program, the government said Thursday.

One of the oddities in the funding debate over health-care reform is how reliant Democrats have been on areas of waste and overpayment. Pulling Medicare Advantage back to the funding levels of standard Medicare, for instance, is netting them between $100 billion and $200 billion (depending on the bill). Instituting reforms like bundled payments that we should've done years ago is responsible for tens of billions more.

President Barack Obama says Medicare will exist for many more years, thanks to new legislation that helped put the health care program for America's seniors on stronger financial footing.

Medicare recipients could see higher premiums for prescription drug coverage as a result of changes to complex provisions in a Senate health care bill, a senior Republican said Friday.

Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele opposes a government-run health care system, as do most members of his party. While most health care overhaul proposals assume big savings by reworking Medicare, Steele tells Steve Inskeep that Medicare needs to be protected and not cut in the name of health insurance reform.

In Washington, some talk about the health-care problem as if it's simply a Medicare problem. That's not true. It's just that the CBO estimates Medicare's impact on the deficit, and so we get frequent reminders of the threat from Medicare. But imagine if we fix Medicare but don't get private spending under control. Here's what'll happen to our incomes:

Back during the health-care debate, the administration was often accused of "double counting" the savings from the bill. This accusation was sort of true (the dispute relates to technical questions about the nature of trust funds that are mind-numbingly boring), but it confused a lot of people. Commonly, people thought that meant the Congressional Budget Office's estimate of the bill's savings was wrong. But it wasn't.