The smart way to fix Medicare: Healthcare reform

[dtotire]

The smart way to fix Medicare: Healthcare reform
Since passage of the Affordable Health Care Act, the long range government spending forecast has vastly improved

By Andrew Leonard

Daring to go where most pundits fear to tread, Bruce Bartlett has actually read the 2010 annual report of Medicare's trustees. And he's discovered something rather astonishing.

It shows that the Affordable Health Care Act, which was opposed by every Republican, will substantially reduce long-term spending. In a related report, Medicare's actuaries make clear that Republican plans to effectively abolish Medicare are utopian in the extreme.

I'm not sure that "utopian" is the right word to describe plans to "effectively abolish Medicare,"but the real surprise here is that we haven't heard more about this from the Obama administration. In the long term, rising health care costs will be the single greatest contributor to government spending deficits. Obama sold his health care reform plan, in part, as a first step in dealing with this problem. Now here's a report documenting that the Affordable Health Care Act will do exactly what he said it would do. According to Bartlett, over the long run, "Medicare’s unfunded liability fell from almost $90 trillion in 2009 to less than $30 trillion, a two-thirds improvement in one year."

There are two caveats, however.

First, from the Trustees' report:

In the long range, however, much of this improvement depends on the feasibility of the ACA's downward adjustments to future increases in Medicare prices for most categories of health care providers.

That's a pretty big if.


more:

http://www.salon.com/news/healthcare_reform/index.html?story=/tech/htww/2010/08/20/healthcare_reform_and_medicare

[bemildred]

1. Single payer for all.

Costs have to come down, profit has to come way down, and acute care must be available to everyone who needs it.

[CurtEastPoint]

2. Seond that, MIllie!

[zipplewrath]

3. It saves the feds money

It took me a while to understand, but in the end HCR was about saving the federal government money. It doesn't save the majority of Americans money, and it will do little to control the costs of health CARE. And it won't really therefor do much to control health insurance for individuals. But mostly through medicare and medicaid cost savings, it will save the feds money, well at least in the sense of lowering the rate of the feds costs increases.