There’s now video of Joe Lieberman supporting the Medicare buy-in concept – not during his 2000 or 2004 national campaigns, but in a discussion with the Connecticut Post just three months ago, in September 2009.

My proposals were to basically expand the existing successful public health insurance programs Medicare and Medicaid. In the case of Medicaid, to allow people who were above the eligibility level to buy into the Medicaid system, under the theory that it would be up to a certain income level, under the theory that they would buy into it at less than the market rate of health insurance.

When it came to Medicare I was very focused on a group — post 50, maybe more like post 55. People who have retired early, or unfortunately have been laid off early, who lose their health insurance and they’re too young to qualify for Medicare.

What I was proposing was that they have an option to buy into Medicare early and again on the premise that that would be less expensive than the enormous cost. If you’re 55 or 60 and you’re without health insurance and you go in to try to buy it, because you’re older, although to me still young and vital, you’re rated as a risk so you pay a lot of money.

Lieberman is looking back favorably upon those proposals while not specifically endorsing them today. But the points that he is making – that Medicaid or Medicare expansion as a buy-in would be a cheaper play for individuals than purchasing health insurance as a high-risk customer – is true, and actually it can be expanded. It would also be cheaper for the federal government to expand Medicaid and Medicare than to provide the kind of subsidies necessary to make insurance coverage affordable for these groups. And, it would be cheaper for total national health spending as well, in all likelihood.

Lieberman is actually NOT a stalwart vote for protecting Medicare, as we’ll get into in future posts. He was using the Medi-Choice issue in his national campaigns as a way for him to talk about health care reform positively. He has no national career, and now no incentive to do that anymore. So he can simply let thousands die in an attempt to humiliate liberals and block any meaningful bill.

However, he was defending a contradiction in his record. By September he was already talking down the public option. So he played up the Medicare buy-in as an alternative. Senate Democrats called his bluff. And he reversed himself without blinking an eye.