Op-Ed: Build Health Reform On What Works
Op-Ed
Op-Ed: Build Health Reform On What Works
Americans want affordable, quality health care for all. We know that if reform is too costly, it will be unsustainable and result in exploding budget deficits, lower-quality services and/or rationing.
House Democrats advocate a government insurance program (patterned on Medicare) and an expansion of Medicaid. I support Medicare and Medicaid, but they are not a sound basis for reform.
Medicare is a popular program insuring those over 65. But, as President Barack Obama says, Medicare will be bankrupt in 2018. It is not a good model for reform.
Medicaid is a federal and state program which insures the poor. Medicaid costs are challenging state budgets. For example, next year Louisiana may have to cut its Medicaid budget $1 billion. Requiring Louisiana to pay for a Medicaid expansion will force a choice between higher taxes or significant cuts to other programs.
Not surprisingly, given the basis of the proposal, the Congressional Budget Office predicts that the costs of the proposed reform will grow 8 percent per year. This more than doubles cost every decade.
This is a higher rate of inflation than status quo! This is fiscally unsound and foolish. Especially since the Obama administration recently announced that its deficit projections for the next decade (before calculating in the cost of health reform) had risen from $7 trillion to $9 trillion.
CBO said the reform proposal did not control costs because it was not transformational. McKinsey & Company, a leading consulting firm, states that transforming health care requires decreasing administrative costs, incentivizing healthy lifestyles and transparent pricing. These elements are in a patient-centered system.
One example of this is a Health Savings Account with a high deductible insurance policy for costlier events. HSAs give patients direct control over health-care dollars and decisions. Because HSAs belong to the patient, they give incentive to wise health-care spending.
The payoff, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, is that HSAs are 30 percent cheaper than traditional insurance policies with similar benefits and 25 percent of those with an HSA were previously uninsured. Because costs are controlled, quality health care becomes more accessible.
Healthier lifestyles are given incentives in a patient-centered system. For example, Safeway, a large grocery chain, lowers premiums for employees who enroll in stop-smoking programs. Safeway has a healthier, more productive work force and controls health-care costs.
These are just two examples of a transformative patient-centered health system that promises to control costs and make quality health care more accessible to all. Other examples can be found at http://cassidy.house.gov.
A constant theme at town-hall meetings is that Americans want reform. But, they want reform that works, not that which builds upon what is broken. May our government be as wise as the American people.
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