Health Care Industry Letter Challenges The CBO To Find Savings
Health Care Industry Letter Challenges The CBO To Find Savings
This year’s effort to reform health care is the year of strange bedfellow coalitions. A number of of industry-union-consumer group alliances like Better Health Care Together, Divided We Fail, The Health Care Dialogue and more, have already rhetorically devoted themselves to reducing health care costs and expanding access to better quality care.
Today, another round of doctors, hospitals, drug makers and insurance companies are “voluntarily coming together” to present President Obama with a letter promising to reduce the growth rate in annual health spending by 1.5 percentage points a year over the next 10 years, lowering spending overall health care spending by $2 trillion (this represents a 20 percent reduction in projected growth.)
Administration officials estimate that with such reductions, a family of four would save $2,500 and by 2019 national health expenditures would decrease by 3 percent of GDP, or $700 billion. The fiscal gap would shrink by 5 percent of GDP and the nation would inch towards a sustainable fiscal trajectory, they project.
The numbers are significant, impressive, but short on specifics for how industry will reduce costs. Early reports indicate that the signers — the Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed), America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the American Hospital Association (AHA), the American Medical Association (AMA) and Pharmaceutical Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), among others — hope to contain costs by implementing “aggressive efforts to prevent obesity, coordinate care, manage chronic illnesses and curtail unnecessary tests and procedures; by standardizing insurance claim forms; and by increasing the use of information technology, like electronic medical records.”
The industry is suggesting that these cost containment measures — which don’t score too well with the Congressional Budget Office — would in fact yield cost savings and help finance health reform. The letter blunts conservative critics who argue that health reform is unsustainable or too expensive, and it also takes on the CBO, whose models are likely under-scoring the savings from reforms.
Industry groups stepping up and committing themselves to supporting common sense — even progressive– cost containment measures is a major political victory for the administration, one it can use to pressure the stakeholders to adopt reforms. Still, as Paul Krugman argues, “the point is that there’s every reason to be cynical about these players’ motives. Remember that what the rest of us call health care costs, they call income.”
2 Responses to “Health Care Industry Letter Challenges The CBO To Find Savings”
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Whoaaa There! ” … aggressive efforts to prevent obesity, coordinate care, manage chronic illnesses and curtail unnecessary tests and procedures; by standardizing insurance claim forms; and by increasing the use of information technology, like electronic medical records.”
Isn’t that the understanding we had DECADES AGO when HMO/PPOs were chartered … having asserted that by consolidating and streamlining the provision of health care – with a critical focus on effective prevention – they could provide health care most efficiently.
Put quite simply, have they?
May 11th, 2009 at 1:38 pmGovernment funded health care is cruel, because it prolongs suffering to those who really need the care, like the elderly and very sick.
It also raises health care cost so much that it makes health care unaffordable to everyone, including the government. This is why government health care often causes health care rationing, shortages, and diminished quality of care, when people can not pay any more taxes.
The insurance industry is trying to manage the huge cost of increased health care because of governmental policies while, at the same time, following insurance law that is written, dictated, and demanded by big government, even if it hurts consumers and raises premium
Government funded health care, leaves people lives in the hands of government bureaucrats, who will decide if people literally decide if one lives or die. After all, where do you go if the government denies your care because it is too expensive, as it often does with the elderly or to those who statistically are going to die? Seniors suffer so much under government run health care.
Where do you go if the government is incompetent or decides that you don’t need the surgery or pain medication?
What does the doctor do when he or she is not paid or told what kind of care the needs to be offered, in order to save money?
With private care, not only do health care costs become affordable to everyone, but you can hold a health care provider accountable for the quality of care, unlike government bureaucrats.
There is a reason why cures for sickness are found here and not in other places in the world. There is a reason why the really sick come here.
May 11th, 2009 at 6:44 pm