If they were really serious about saving money from Medicare, the Very Serious Schmucks could follow some of the suggestions in economist Dean Baker's book, "The End of Loser Liberalism". Sure, they'll tick off Big Pharma. But they can't be any less popular than the suggestion of raising the Medicare age, right?

For example, the nation will spend close to $300 billion in 2011 on prescription drugs. In the absence of government-enforced patent monopolies, the same drugs would cost around $30 billion, an amount that implies a transfer to the pharmaceutical industry of close to $270 billion a year, or about 1.8 percent of gross domestic product. It is close to 15 times current federal spending on the main government welfare program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and it dwarfs the money at stake from a main goal of progressives: eliminating the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.

[oldembed src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dx3HhCDC36s?rel=0" width="425" height="319" resize="1" fid="21"]

Baker has lots of interesting ideas about how to cut Medicare costs. For one, he says we could simply give Medicare recipients vouchers to buy into the health insurance systems of other countries.

This big cost difference means that there are enormous potential savings from allowing Medicare beneficiaries to receive their care in Canada, Germany, or other wealthy countries rather than in the United States. Figure 8-4 shows the potential benefit to Medicare beneficiaries, and dual beneficiaries of Medicare and Medicaid, if they got their care in Canada and split the savings with the government. The gains to beneficiaries would easily dwarf the average Social Security benefit in the decades ahead, according to the government‟s projections. Splitting the savings would both provide beneficiaries with a substantial boost to their retirement income and allow the government to address its deficit.

But I especially liked his plans for Big Pharma: