Bush’s Market-Based Medicare Reforms Will Harm Health Care Safety Net, Reich Writes

President Bush's $1.3 trillion tax cut will leave "no money" for Medicare after the baby boom generation retires, evidence that the Bush administration "assumes that boomers will just take care of themselves," former Labor Secretary Robert Reich writes in a Los Angeles Times opinion piece. Reich states that Bush's plans to "save Social Security" and "overhaul Medicare" are "fig leaves for a long-term strategy to get rid of these social insurance schemes altogether." Reich writes that under such "market-based" changes, private insurers "naturally will do everything they can to sign up clients at the lowest risk ... while eschewing the high risks." He continues, "So without social insurance, people who are poorer or who face higher risk of having bad things happen to them won't be covered" (Reich, Los Angeles Times, 6/21).