Here's the idea: you give seniors a chance to opt out of Medicare. If they want to, you hand them a chit worth a specified amount of money and send them shopping for their own health coverage. Bureaucracy gives way to the forces of the free market. Insurance companies, in a dash to sign up tens of millions of new policyholders, come up with an array of attractive new offerings well beyond Medicare's--dental coverage, eyeglasses, hearing aids, annual physicals, prescription drugs. Everyone benefits--and at far less cost to the government.
That, in essence, is the concept behind the Medicare plan Texas...