Good start; more surgery needed

Medicare dollars should go to:

A. Physicians who provide health care to the elderly.

B. Insurance companies that provide profits to their stockholders.

Predictably, both Kentuckians in the Senate, Mitch McConnell and Jim Bunning, picked B when the choice came to the Senate floor Wednesday.

But enough Republicans defected from McConnell's leadership to produce a veto-proof victory for health care for seniors.

The choice was between reducing Medicare payments to physicians by almost 11 percent or trimming $13.8 million from what's known as Medicare Advantage, the privatized form of Medicare advocated by the Bush administration and created by congressional Republicans.

Privatized Medicare was supposed to save money and give senior citizens more choice.

Instead, it costs 12 to 19 percent more than traditional Medicare and has produced nightmares for many patients and doctors who, according to government audits, have been misled by deceptive marketing and denied promised benefits.

The House approved a measure 355-59 last month averting pay cuts to doctors.

But the Senate fell one vote short of the 60 needed to end a Republican filibuster and approve the measure.

After hearing from doctors and patients over the July 4 holiday, Republicans saw the light.

And Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy returned to the Senate for the first time since beginning cancer treatments to vote for the bill, even though in the end his vote wasn't needed.

The bill doesn't end privatized Medicare. In fact, the changes are extremely modest.

What it does, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, is create new requirements that do away with the unjustified competitive advantages that private ”fee for service“ plans have over other Medicare Advantage plans such as HMOs or preferred-provider organizations.

Because the ”fee for service“ plans are the fastest growing and most expensive part of privatized Medicare, savings will be generated just by slowing their growth.

Those savings can help cover the cost of restoring payments to physicians, which were cut by 10.6 percent on July 1.

Medicare hasn't given physicians a raise for years. But privatized Medicare has been a bonanza for the insurance industry.

To protect the long-term solvency of Medicare, Congress will have to take a scalpel to the privatization experiment.