[NittanyLion]

It isn't my "conjecture." That's what is written into this Medicare bill.

By your reading of the bill, is privatization a certainty? Or will it be tried in limited markets and adopted on a larger scale only if successful?

Furthermore, in your experience when entitlements are enacted do they never, sometimes, usually or always remain within their original scope? More importantly, are they ever discontinued?

I understand the importance of reading what's in the bill. But one would have to be quite naive to not couple their real world experience in predicting where this is heading.

[Southack]

"Furthermore, in your experience when entitlements are enacted do they never, sometimes, usually or always remain within their original scope? More importantly, are they ever discontinued?"

You do realize that Welfare Reform passed all the way back under Clinton, right?

What I'm trying to do is frame this debate about actual substance, rather than around hyperbole and conjecture. What's really in the bill itself? We know how much money is authorized in it, yet people who are against don't want to use those figures. Why not? Why isn't their case made with those actual figures? Does $10 per month per American simply not scare people sufficiently for their purposes?

We also know that there are numerous Privatization angles in the bill. Should any one of those Privatization options perform well-enough to captivate the Public's attention, the push for accelerating the Reform would be intense.

There is also a time limit on both enacting the Reforms as well as on the overall program. After ten years, new legislation would be required to alter the Privatization or fund addition years of subsidies.

Overall, I do not dispute that there are risks involved. This program could become disfigured and somehow grow into unending pork. But that isn't inevitable. It would take *new* legislation to pass for that to happen. It certainly can't happen under the legislation that exists today.

That being said, there is still room to say that this bill costs too much to gain a Privatization option for all of Medicare. Why not simply make that quite legitimate case? Why resort to straw men and hyperbole such as the fanciful "Trillions" in supposed future costs that aren't in the actual bill itself?

The bill costs $39.5 Billion per year for each of ten years. That's about $10 per month per American. If ten Dollars is too much for Privatizing all of Medicare, then just say so.

We're all adults. We can handle the truth.