Plan for Medicare is a good opening

Joe Biden isn’t about to let Medicare go belly up on his watch. With his proposal to shore up the popular health insurance program for senior citizens for the next quarter century, the president is looking to take on the matter head on.

Good for him.

His plan calls for increasing to 5% from 3.9% the Medicare tax withheld for people earning more than $400,000 annually. It would also make adjustments to the taxation of business and investment income as well as those who are self-employed.

Though the proposal as written will not become law — not with Republicans holding the gavel in the House, anyway — it’s a solid opening salvo in the battle to preserve Medicare.

Consider this: Biden was just 3 years old when President Harry Truman proposed the establishment of government-sponsored health insurance for the nation’s seniors. That was in 1945. And it was fully 20 years later when President Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law, in Truman’s hometown of Independence, Missouri.

Though the program has become broadly popular over the decades, it surely wasn’t so straight out of the gate. And neither, it’s important to recall, was Social Security. Each was derided by some on the right wing of the Republican Party as little more than socialism.

How times have changed. Social Security, of course, is the most successful and popular government program in our nation’s history, with Medicare not far behind.

It’s possible — reasonable, even — to have a rational discussion about the longterm viability of the Medicare program. (Same, too, with Social Security, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

If you think Biden’s plan for Medicare has some problems, you are not alone. It’s far less than perfect. But if you believe it’s a failure, then it only makes sense to propose a viable alternative.

Because Medicare needs to survive. Our president has proposed a way to make that happen. Don’t like it? Fine. Then suggest an alternative.

Biden likes to tell his critics not to compare him to the almighty, but instead to the alternative. It’s a good line. Because it gets us back to reality.

There are lots of pie-in-the-sky plans regarding Medicare. Many are just privatization by another name or gussied up Ponzi schemes, supposedly making Medicare last forever.

But back herein the real world, what’s needed are real solutions.