Editorial “A broken promise on health reform” states “President Obama’s promise to rein in health care costs as part of his health reform plan apparently has fallen by the way side. A 10-year forecast by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services shows total health spending growing annually by 5.8 percent under the president’s Affordable Care Act. Without the legislation, spending would grow slightly less – 5.7percent annually. Officials at the agency attribute the growth, in part, to expansion of the insured population.”
WATCHDOG: If costs are only going up “slightly” and we are insuring a much larger population, that is a success in itself.
But it is a misconception to refer to what emerged from Congress as the Obama health plan. What we suspect President Barack Obama would have preferred would have been Medicare For Everyone. But what he did propose and then had to back away from was a government sponsored insurance program to bring economic competition to the health care field.
What emerged, in large part to gain the filibuster ending 60th vote of Joe Lieberman, the senator from the insurance capital of the nation – Hartford Connecticut , was a version that enriched the health insurance companies and enabled about 30 million Americans to have health insurance coverage. Savings, if there are to be any, will have to come from Geisinger / Kaiser Permanente type programs that emphasize preventive medicine, unlike what is practiced by most hospitals, including Lancaster General Hospital. (Their unwillingness to help fund a syringe exchange is an example of their self serving miopia.)
Now that the New Era is consistently publishing sober editorials, it would be a good idea for the editors to study what other nations are doing. For example, France is acknowledged to provide the best health care in the world. It has per capita 2/3rd of the cost of the 17% of Gross National Product that the USA spends. The USA is ranked around 16th in the world for health care by most accounts.
As we have explained often in the past, the root problem came from wage freezes during the Second World War which nevertheless permitted employers to offer new fringe benefits, of which contribution towards health care insurance became a popular one. This in turn lead to triangular struggles among health care providers, insurance companies and the public, misdirection of incentives, and a huge waste of resources due to all that is required to administer the system.
If the Republicans would cooperate with President Obama, much could be accomplish even without Medicare For All, by using Geisinger and Kaiser prototypes and investing more in national programs of health records and research. But they won’t because putting the public first isn’t politically expedient. This sad tale is symptomatic of what led to the fall of the Roman Republic.
