Hey, I'm at least part way there with today's Mike Ross. Open up Medicare, like Ross -- believe it or not -- says he wants to do. That's what Kennedy's original bill did, after all; his bill is the source of the idea to lower Medicare eligibility by five-year increments.

Medicare is simple and proven, so make Medicare for All the starting point. Ross is right about that.

Forget about the pissant public option -- besides being a bailout for the insurance companies, the health exchanges and all the "nudge" programs on healthy lifestyles are just bailouts for IT people and consultants in the "creative" [cough] "class." Not to mention Democratic strategists.

Plus Medicare is already up and running, so it would be easy to understand. None of this nonsense about taking 5 years to do it right (with the insurance companies, the IT people, and the consultants billing by the hour for the whole time).

Now, Ross wants to have the buy in reimbursements for Medicare high.

The last sentence is key: reimbursing providers who treat the new enrollees at market rates (which are, on average, about 20-30% higher than Medicare rates) satisfies the provider community and conservative politicians from rural states who argue that their hospitals would close if they were reimbursed at Medicare rates.

So make your battle beating down the buy-in price. Then you get rid of the insurance companies, instead of building them into the system for the next thirty years, like "progressives" want to do.

Note that all the arguments -- every single one of them -- that public option advocates make for an incremental approach apply with equal force to Ross's Medicare concept. We'll just tilt the playing field over time -- except with Medicare, the field is more favorable to us to start. Heck, I bet Ross's constituents don't even think it's a government program!

UPDATE Hipparchia corrects me on buy-in. It's late, and I don't know where I got that idea; maybe from Politico which also covered it. I still say that if we have to compromise, and get out of "a bad bill is worse than no bill" mode, it makes sense to go with a proven system that we can implement immediately and go full force against the insurance companies, instead of this health exchange crap.

UPDATE I'm guessing Ross's constituents gave him an earful (just like Jello Jay's WV constituents gave him a spine). And since they don't think of Medicare as a government program -- because anything that works can't be a government program -- it's all good!