Many attacks on health reform involve assertions that the law’s proposed Medicare savings can’t possibly materialize, that the Democrats just made stuff up. So it’s worth looking at where those savings are supposed to come from. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has a nice
summary of the law’s financing; here’s the Medicare table:
The 10-year total is $441 billion. Which parts of this are at all flaky?
Not the cuts in Medicare Advantage — that’s a straightforward reversal of the giveaway embedded in the 2003 Bush drug benefit law.
Not the reduction in drug costs, which amounts simply to making better use of bargaining power that we already know the government has — in fact, this item could have been much larger.
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So, will the reform produce exactly the assumed savings? No. But there’s no reason to consider the whole thing pie in the sky. In fact, there’s a reasonable chance that by finally placing some emphasis on only paying for treatments that work, the reform will actually save considerably more than the law assumes.