Their Views for May 19

Hillary Clinton’s modestly radical idea for Medicare

Hillary Clinton wants Americans to have access to Medicare starting at age 50. It’s an idea well worth considering, not least because so many Americans aged 50 to 64 who don’t have job-based health insurance struggle to afford the relatively high premiums they’re charged for private plans. And Medicare is a popular, battle-tested and relatively inexpensive insurance system, costing less per person than private insurance.

Such an expansion would have to be carefully designed, however, to make sure Medicare premiums for this age group accurately and transparently reflect the cost of coverage. Underpricing would undercut private insurers competing for the same customers, and also saddle taxpayers with the extra cost.

The most straightforward approach would be to offer people younger than 65 a price equal to the full cost of their coverage. That would probably be at least $7,600 for people in their early 60s — an estimate the Congressional Budget Office came up with in 2008. Today, the figure would be even higher, and it’s not clear how many people would want to pay it.

In contrast, the average second-most-generous Obamacare plan this year costs $10,911 for a 60-year-old. But the government subsidizes those premiums through a tax credit to people whose incomes are less than 400 percent of the poverty line. It would make sense to offer the same subsidies to people who would buy into Medicare.

If the price were well calculated, a Medicare option could offer needed competition in places where few companies sell insurance on state exchanges. That’s increasingly important: The number of counties where just one plan is available is projected to triple to more than 650 next year. And covering preventive care for people during the decade before they reach 65 could potentially lower Medicare spending on chronic diseases.

Selling Medicare policies on the exchanges would be an ambitious, yet not radical, way to expand insurance coverage. In other words, just the kind of incremental reform the health care system needs.

— Bloomberg View

Hello, out there: Kepler finds 1,284 more planets, some Earth-like

NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope continues to expand the boundary of mankind’s understanding of space.

Last week, NASA announced that it has confirmed Kepler’s discovery of 1,284 new planets orbiting distant stars. Of this cornucopia of exo-planets, NASA believes nine of them are potentially habitable for life as we understand it. An estimated 550 are rocky planets with 100 of those clocking in at around Earth-size or slightly smaller. Planets that are solid and rocky as opposed to gaseous are more likely to harbor the conditions that will be conducive to life. Liquid of some sort is probably the one non-negotiable necessity for all life — alien or human.

Two Earth-size alien worlds in particular look especially promising: Kepler-1638b and Kepler-1229b. One is in the sweet spot of a “Goldilocks zone” of a nearby star and the other is on the inner edge of that zone circling its star. There’s a lot of excitement about such worlds because they indicate that Earth-like planets may be more common than once believed. Given that there are probably billions of planets circling stars just in our galaxy, this is an amazing possibility.

NASA published its findings in the Astrophysical Journal and briefed researchers from leading universities on its discovery. The known number of planets has effectively doubled, thanks to the probe’s relentless scanning of nearby stars in our Milky Way.

While ground-based telescopes have yet to confirm Kepler’s discoveries, there is little doubt that it will happen. The science is solid and based upon meticulous observation of light fluctuations by stars as the planets transit past them. In capturing these fluctuations, Kepler has been an invaluable window into our cosmic neighborhood.

— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette